C. E. Atkins in Seed Magazine:

Geneticist Bruce Lahn first made a name for himself when he paired with David Page, director of MIT’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, to craft a novel theory on the origins of the Y chromosome. But Lahn is perhaps best known for his paper on the evolution of the human brain, and the implications for intelligence and race that have become attached to it.

Lahn’s paper on the recent evolution of the human brain asserts that new versions of two genes are currently spreading through the human population, and that these genes are more prevalent in some geographic regions than others. He has speculated that these genes may be linked to brain size and intelligence and has wondered if the mutations—one of which took place roughly 40,000 years ago, the other, 5,800 years ago—correlate with the development of art, written language, and the founding of cities. And he stepped on more than a few feet when he noted that, geographically speaking, the changes had occurred pretty much everywhere but sub-Saharan Africa.

More here.

James Elroy in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

Motion pictures pervade the culture far more broadly and immediately than books. It’s a quick-march progression of advance publicity and saturation screen-time. My signature novel will now be a film in wide release. The film will possibly expedite book sales in career-unprecedented numbers. Because of the film, more people may read The Black Dahlia than have read all my other books to date. This affords me a narrative opportunity of stern moment. I will gratefully capitalize on it here. A personal story attends both novel and film. It inextricably links me to two women savaged eleven years apart. These women comprise the central myth of my life. I want to honor them both. I want this piece to redress imbalances in my previous writings about them. I want to close out their myth with an elegy. I want to grant them the peace of denied disclosure and never say another public word about them.

My mother’s name was Geneva Hilliker. She dropped the “Ellroy” when she renounced my father. I laud her repudiation and commend her desire to live without a male-surname appendage. She haunts me in deep and unfathomable ways. I often travel her life at a brisk or painstakingly slow mental speed. I start in rural Wisconsin and end on an access road in L.A. The in-between stops are often filled with conjecture. I lived with her for ten years. The passage of time marks my childhood memories suspect. I later granted her a rich dramatic status and further distorted my memory. I did not know her in life. I am determined to know her in death. Summaries of her forty-three years often provide insight. Brevity enhances my process of refraction.

More here.

John Updike in The New Yorker:

Hugger-mugger takes a lot of explaining, a lot of diagramming. An additional trouble with it, which keeps the suspense thriller, however skillful and polished, a subgenre, is that the novelist, manipulating his human counters on the board, must keep them somewhat blank, with selective disclosure of their inner lives, lest the killer or mole or whatever be prematurely unmasked. Even the most intimate human matters are turned into diagrams. Salvo’s love, Hannah (not to be confused with his wife, Penelope), is thus addressed by an Americanized friend, Baptiste:

“Let’s do facts. Here are the facts. Your friend here fucks you, right? Your friend’s friend knows he fucks you, so he comes to your friend. And he tells your friend a story, which your friend repeats to you because he’s fucking you. You are rightly incensed by this story, so you bring your friend who is fucking you to me, so that he can tell it all over again, which is what your friend’s friend reckoned would happen all along. We call that disinformation.”

Between information and disinformation, characters don’t have much breathing room.

More here.

Louise Jury in The Independent:

Nearly all the favourites to win this year’s £50,000 Man Booker Prize have fallen at the penultimate fence after the judges chose one of the youngest and most eclectic shortlists in years.

In a move that has saved bookmakers a fortune, writers including two-time Booker winner Peter Carey, the highly-acclaimed Andrew O’Hagan and David Mitchell, who was the hottest favourite in the entire history of the prize the last time he was in the running, were all excluded from the final list of six.

Sarah Waters with The Night Watch remains the biggest name in contention and was immediately installed as favourite to take the prestigious prize at the ceremony on 10 October. She has been shortlisted before, for Fingersmith in 2002.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Before 1833 there were no scientists.

It was in that year that William Whewell, a British philosopher, geologist, and all-around bright bulb, coined the word scientist. His mentor, the poet Samuel Coleridge, thought the English language needed a term for someone who studied the natural world but who did not inhabit the lofty heights of philosophy (like Coleridge).

There are plenty of people who lived before 1833 that most of us would call scientists–Isaac Newton, Antoine Lavoisier, Edmund Halley, Carol Linnaeus to name just a few. But the word would have been meaningless to them. The closest term they might use was “natural philosopher.” Their work and ideas were still deeply rooted in medieval ways of thinking about the world, and about the work they did.

Science did not emerge suddenly in a sudden onslaught of Modern Reason crushing Old Ignorance. Its rise was much slower and much more interesting. One of the most important parts of science as we know it is a way for people to share their observations and experiments. Today peer-reviewed journals are at the core of the scientific process. But until the seventeenth century, nothing like them existed. Natural philosophers generally were more interested in what the ancient Greeks and Romans had to say about medicine, physics, and biology, than what they might observe for themselves. In 1665, a group of natural philosophers in England got together and decided to publish what is arguably the first scientific journal: the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

It’s still going strong today, putting out a lot of important papers. And for the next couple months, the Royal Society is making the entire archive–all the way back to 1665–available for free.

In a press release, the Royal Society pointed to some particularly neat papers, such as Ben Franklin’s 1752 description of flying a kite in a thunderstorm. But I immediately looked up a much older paper about lightning from 1666, entitled “A relation of an accident by thunder and lightning, at Oxford.”

More here.

Barbara Rose in the Wall Street Journal:

Today, some of the most original contemporary Iranian artists, such as Shirín Neshat, whose work is now banned in Iran, are living and working in exile in the U.S. And an exhibition of contemporary Iranian photography, organized by the Tehran museum, is touring U.S. museums without the blessings of either government. In this ironic and unwitting cultural exchange, Iran owns historic U.S. paintings that American museums cannot afford and the works of gifted Iranian artists are celebrated by American museums as the cutting edge of the avant-garde. No one knows what will happen to the masterpieces of modern Western art in Tehran. They are said to be worth billions of dollars now and are too expensive to be destroyed. Will they be sold or traded?

More here.

In openDemocracy, Tristan McConnell considers the price of amensty and impunity for the crimes of the Lord’s Resistance Army for peace in Uganda.

A conflict marked by horrendous atrocity – forced abduction, rape, mutilation and massacre – could be dying in the embers of the Opit fire and dozens like it across northern Uganda. For two months, the hot and dusty south Sudanese capital of Juba has hosted peace talks between the LRA and Yoweri Museveni’s Ugandan government. In two decades of war, this is the first time a significant third-party has been heavily involved in attempting to bring peace. South Sudan’s vice-president Riek Machar, fresh from the peace agreement that ended Sudan’s equally lengthy north-south civil war in July 2005, has been instrumental in pushing both sides to the negotiating table…

In December 2003, Museveni invited the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to launch an investigation into the LRA’s war crimes; the ICC announced the opening of its investigation in July 2004. In July 2005 the court arraigned Kony and his top four commanders (Vincent Otti, Raska Lukwiya, Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen), and now seeks their arrest and transfer. But this legal process has collided with the regional political one that seeks an end to the war, one that is now underpinned too by a local justice process of which the Opit meeting may be a foretaste.

For different reasons, both combatants in Uganda’s war are unenthusiastic about the ICC. Yoweri Museveni announced in July that if the LRA rebels lay down their arms he will protect them from prosecution; Joseph Kony has stated that we will not leave the bush until the indictments are withdrawn. These announcements have had the effect of making the ICC charges increasingly appear to be a barrier to peace.

Giles Fraser, vicar of Putney and lecturer in philosophy at Wadham college Oxford, in Ekklesia on Pope Benedict’s comments on holy war.

Any comments by a Christian leader that touch upon this wound are bound to be interpreted from every possible angle. The Pope must have known this. If millions of Muslims were offended by the scribblings of a few unknown Danish cartoonists, it’s pretty obvious the enormous potential for harm that might flow from a few ill-timed comments by the vicar of Rome.

Furthermore, the Pope has form on all of this. Just a few months before he was elected, he spoke out against Muslim Turkey joining the European Union. Christian Europe must be defended, he argued. It didn’t go down well at the time with Muslim leaders.

But what makes his comments from Bavaria doubly insensitive is that Munich and its surrounding towns are home to thousands of Gastarbeiter, many from Turkey, who are often badly treated by local Germans and frequently subjected to racism. It won’t be lost on them that Manuel II ran his Christian empire from what is now the Turkish city of Istanbul. And reference to that time, in circumstances such as these, has the unmistakable whiff of Christian triumphalism.

For the most part, the Pope’s address was a scholarly exercise that sought to challenge the idea that rationality is intrinsically and necessarily secular. We must “overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable”, he insisted. Most Christians would agree. But even here there was a sharp criticism of Islam buried beneath the scholarly rhetoric.

Guy Dinmore at MSNBC:

Moves in Congress to put financial pressure on Sudan to stop the killings in Darfur have been stymied by a combination of big business interests and the Bush administration, according to supporters of legislation blocked in the Senate that would have endorsed decisions by US states to divest from companies involved in Sudan.

Tens of billions of dollars in equity are at stake, mostly of non-US companies and including two listed Chinese energy giants involved in Sudan’s rapidly growing oil industry which fuels the military with arms and other supplies.

While giving rhetorical backing to anti-genocide protests staged around the world on Sunday, Democrats and Republicans admitted that a new watered down draft of the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act was further evidence of US unwillingness as well as inability to take decisive action.

More here.

From The New York Times:

THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina. By Frank Rich.

The author, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, has his liberal views, which are not strikingly original. I happen to agree with him that Karl Rove and George Bush manipulated public fear and wartime patriotism to win elections, and that Dick Cheney and his neocon cheerleaders favored a war in Iraq long before 9/11 “to jump-start a realignment of the Middle East.” Whether Rich is right to say that this has “little or nothing to do with the stateless terrorism of Al Qaeda is debatable. The neocons may well have believed that an American remake of the Middle East was the best way to tackle terrorism.

They were almost certainly mistaken. But the point of Rich’s fine polemic is that the Bush administration has consistently lied about the reasons for going to war, about the way it was conducted and about the terrible consequences. Whatever the merits of removing a dictator, waging war under false pretenses is highly damaging to a democracy, especially when one of the ostensible aims is to spread democracy to others. If Rich is correct, which I think he is, the Bush administration has given hypocrisy a bad name.

More here.

From The Guardian:

In an essay last week to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Martin Amis hit out at the virulence of Islamism. Here, writer Pankaj Mishra lambasts Amis’s ‘moral superiority’ and takes issue with the intellectual arrogance of political elites in the West who fail to understand the Muslim world. He argues that an out-of-touch US administration is repeating the fatal errors of the Vietnam War, resulting in a war on terror that is a political, military and intellectual fiasco.

Martin Amis’s essay on Islam and Islamism goes on for more than 10,000 words without describing an individual experience of Muslim societies deeper than Christopher Hitchens’s acquisition of an Osama T-shirt in Peshawar and the Amis family’s failure to enter, after closing time, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

‘The impulse towards rational inquiry,’ Amis asserts, ‘is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male.’ There are countless other startling claims (according to Amis, the army was on the Islamist side in the Algerian civil war) in his essay, whose pseudo-scholarship and fanatical conviction of moral superiority make it resemble nothing more than one of bin Laden’s desperately literary screeds.

Such a bold and hectic display of prejudice and ignorance invites the dinner-party frivolity of Amis’s genitals-centric analysis (constipation and sexual frustration) of radical Islam. But what forces us to take it seriously is not only that its author is one of our leading novelists, but also that his cliches about non-western peoples (they are all very irrational out there) and strident belief in ‘Western’ rationality are now commonplace in elite liberal-left as well as conservative circles in the government and media.

More here.

Jaffer Kolb in Metropolis Magazine:

Known for his energetic and globe-trotting ways, Rem Koolhaas finally admitted to being exhausted on July 29th. He was speaking in the pavilion he designed on the lawn of London’s Serpentine Gallery. In the twentieth hour of a 24-hour interview marathon session which featured internationally-known artists and intellectuals, he said, “Chantal [Mouffe, a political scientist], at this point you have to help us out. We are exhausted. At this point we cannot hope to equal you. We happily surrender as your inferiors.”

He was referring to himself and to Hans Ulrich Obrist, the art historian and author, with whom he had been in conversation since 6:00 p.m. the previous day, at the event which the two of them organized. It was now 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, and the interviewers, organizers, and many of the spectators who had not left the scene since the talks began were showing the signs of overload. But the bright and fantastically articulate Mouffe easily fell into talking about agonistic pluralism in democracy and the generation of democratic spaces.

The event, which was segmented into eight three-hour sections with short breaks between, began with some of the most well-known participants including London-based architects Zaha Hadid and David Adjaye, architectural theorist Charles Jencks, musician Brian Eno, author Hanif Kureishi, filmmaker Ken Loach, and artist Yinka Shonibare.

More here.  And even more on this marathon interview at ArtForum here.

Jolene Craig in the Parkersburg News and Sentinel:

A cardiac surgeon from Harvard Medical School performed a technique new to the Mid-Ohio Valley Friday with live video to other doctors in St. Joseph’s Hospital.

Dr. Lawrence H. Cohn, Virginia and James Hubbard Professor of Cardiac Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Mass., performed mitral valve repair on a female patient with live video feed to a conference room to allow for cardiac surgeons to ask questions during the procedure, said Jill Parsons, vice president of St. Joseph’s Hospital…

“St. Joseph’s Hospital lead cardiac surgeon Dr. Syed Tasnim Raza trained with Cohn and talked him into coming to Parkersburg,” Parsons said.

Cohn said Raza worked in his lab 20 years ago and they have remained friends.

More here.  And make sure you click on the video below to see a short clip featuring Drs. Raza and Cohn. [If you have a pop-up blocker installed, try holding the cntrl-key down when you click.]

Teaching With New Technology

I myself have been “operated” on once by Dr. Syed T. Raza: he stiched up a gash over my right eye after accidentally smashing me with a squash raquet during a game. (I must have been beating him!) He did a pretty good job too (with the stiching, I mean). He is, I could not be more proud to say, my much respected and beloved brother.

Via the NYT, an open letter to the Indian government, drafted by Vikram Seth and signed by prominent Indians:

To build a truly democratic and plural India, we must collectively fight against laws and policies that abuse human rights and limit fundamental freedoms

This is why we, concerned Indian citizens and people of Indian origin, support the overturning of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial-era law dating to 1861, which punitively criminalized romantic love and private, consensual sexual acts between adults of the same sex.

In independent India, as earlier, this archaic and brutal law has served no good purpose. It has been used to systematically persecute, blackmail, arrest and terrorize sexual minorities. It has spawned public intolerance and abuse, forcing tens of millions of gays and bisexual men and women to live in fear and secrecy, at tragic cost to themselves and their families.

From Amartya Sen’s letter in support:

It is surprising that independent India has not yet been able to rescind the colonial era monstrosity in the shape of Section 377, dating from 1861. That, as it happens, was the year in which the American Civil War began, which would ultimately abolish the unfreedom of slavery in the America. Today, 145 years later, we surely have urgent reason to abolish in India, with our commitment to democracy and human rights, the unfreedom of arbitrary and unjust criminalization.

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In the upcoming Boston Review, 6 proposals by 6 scholars, presented to members of Congress, on how to reform our democracy.

TWO: Let citizen assemblies draw districts. [Archon Fung]…

Many reformers favor independent commissions—such as those used in Arizona—as a remedy for this gerrymandering. However, it may be difficult to inoculate such commissions from partisan influence. Most of the notables who would be appointed to such blue-ribbon affairs would likely have political histories and established loyalties. Those who did not would likely be the targets of intense partisan pressure and subterfuge. Even if commissions were politically immunized, they could still be summoned to serve highly partisan ends, as in the recent attempt to initiate redistricting by California’s Republican governor. Furthermore, electoral districting is never merely a technical exercise. Ethical choices must be made. For example, is the coherence of communities more important than competitiveness and political accountability? Appointed experts have dubious democratic standing when it comes to such decisions.

Consider an alternative method of redistricting in which ordinary citizens formulate redistricting plans. The main benefits of this directly democratic alternative are:

Fairness. The formulation of electoral boundaries would be insulated from partisan and incumbent influence.

Ethical transparency. The democratic values and rationales for electoral boundaries would be transparent, explicit, and determinative.

Democratic legitimacy. Electoral boundaries created by ordinary citizens rather than political elites or independent “experts” would build democratic legitimacy for, and popular ownership of, a political system that is now regarded with justified cynicism.

The idea of citizen assemblies as an element of electoral reform is not new.

Since Leszek Kolakowski and E. P. Thompson (and Althusser) have been part of the current zeitgeist, I went back and read Thompson’s “An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski” and Kolakowski’s response, “My Correct Views on Everything“. (Althusser, I never really got and thus got into. Althuserrianism struck me as the death throes of Marxist theory, with Analytical Marxism as the pallbearer in the wings.) Apart from enjoying the pieces for their style (both were remarkable stylists as well as admirable thinkers), they brought back in a sudden blast a different world in which one conflict–costing millions of lives–defined its parameters for a century.

In Scientific American:

In February 2003 a Sudanese militia began targeting tribes in Darfur, a region in western Sudan. The militia killed and displaced vast numbers of people in what would later be called genocide. Early surveys by the World Health Organization (WHO) found a two-month death rate of 10,000 a month, and later estimates simply extended the death toll based on that rate, up to 180,000 after 18 months. In the spring of 2005, however, the U.S. Department of State reported its own figure, including a lower estimate of 63,000 to 146,000. Some news organizations still cite the lower number, stating that tens of thousands have died.

In an attempt to form a more accurate assessment, sociologists calculated death rates and total deaths during a 19-month period using what they consider the seven best primary surveys from camps in the state of West Darfur. Together the surveys, conducted by the WHO and the humanitarian group Médecins Sans Frontières, document pre-camp violence in five camps and in-camp mortality throughout the state. Projecting their data to 31 months, or about three quarters of the conflict’s duration, they estimated that between 58,000 and 85,000 died in West Darfur alone. Assuming the same ratios of death and displacement in adjoining North and South Darfur, they arrive at a conservative estimate of 170,000 to 255,000 deaths.

(For those with access to Science, the study can be found here.)

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Don’t eat your spinach.

That’s the word coming today from the FDA: they want everyone to avoid bagged spinach until they can get to the bottom of a nasty outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7, a virulent strain that infects an estimated 70,000 people in the United States and kills about 60. A number of people have gotten sick in the new outbreak, apparently from eating contaminated spinach, and there’s been a report of one death in Wisconsin.

There’s a fascinating–albeit gruesome–backstory to this outbreak, which I’ve been researching for my next book, a portrait of Escherichia coli. Escherichia coli is regular inhabitant of the human gut (not to mention the guts of mammals and birds). You carry about a trillion harmless E. coli. E. coli has also become the model par excellence for understanding the nuts and bolts of life. Lots of Nobel Prizes were awarded for research on these fascinating bugs.

Over the twentieth century, scientists began to discover that some strains of Escherichia coli are not so nice. A group of strains called Shigella cause diarrhea, for example, killing over a million people a year. And new virulent strains keep turning up.

More here.

Susan Okie in the New England Journal of Medicine:

In a world with many celebrities but few heroes, Bill Gates has attained heroic status by committing much of his enormous fortune to the advancement of global equity. He and his wife have targeted the causes of health disparities between rich and poor, and their foundation has become a driving force in international aid and in research on AIDS and other diseases. In June, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s likely impact on global health was amplified when Warren Buffett, the world’s second-richest man, announced plans to give most of his fortune to the foundation established by the richest one. 

Buffett’s gift, worth about $37 billion, will double the foundation’s endowment from $29 billion to approximately $60 billion, making it by far the world’s largest charitable foundation. The gift will also increase the foundation’s annual giving from $1.36 billion last year to about $3 billion, or approximately $1 per year for every person in the poorer half of the world’s population. By comparison, the World Bank estimates that total health-related aid to developing countries in 2004 (from governments, international organizations, and private sources) was about $12.7 billion (see graph).

More here.