From Edge:

When it comes to creatures living in the oceans, I, like most people, have always been enthralled by the popular favorites such as whales, polar bears and sea otters. It takes a special person to appreciate that there is just as much wonder to be found in the ocean’s smallest and humblest organic forms—the microbes, genes and proteins without which the more charismatic creatures wouldn’t exist at all.

J. Craig Venter, 60, a former National Institutes of Health physiologist, who led the effort to sequence and publish the human genome in 2001, is one such person. Through the institute that bears his name, he is sponsoring the second of two global expeditions by the research ship Sorcerer II to sample microbes and proteins throughout the world’s oceans and seas.

The Sorcerer II’s journeys have so far yielded a database of 6.3 million genetic base pairs and 1,700 new families of proteins, not to mention 150 new species of microbes in waters off Bermuda that were once considered a biological desert—and the searching and counting is nowhere near complete.

More here.

Douglas McGray in Wired:

Three years ago, Alejandro Gutierrez got a strange and tantalizing message from Hong Kong. Some McKinsey consultants were putting together a business plan for a big client that wanted to build a small city on the outskirts of Shanghai. But the land, at the marshy eastern tip of a massive, mostly undeveloped island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was a migratory stop for one of the rarest birds in the world — the black-faced spoonbill, a gangly white creature with a long, flat beak.

McKinsey wanted to know if the developer, the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation, could bring businesses to the island without messing up thet bird habitat. The consultants thought Gutierrez’s firm could figure it out. Gutierrez, an architect and urban designer for engineering and design giant Arup, didn’t know anything about birds. But he was a veteran of several big-city design projects in his native Chile and something of a young star at Arup’s London headquarters. The scope of the idea awed him. A whole new city? Were they serious? More important, could Arup get in on it? He quickly caught a flight to Shanghai.

Today Gutierrez and a team of Arup specialists from Europe, North America, and Asia are finalizing a plan for a scratch- built metropolis called Dongtan. Anywhere else in the world, it would have been a thought exercise, done up pretty for a design book or a museum show. But Shanghai’s economy is growing three times faster than the US economy did at the height of the dotcom boom. More than 2,000 high-rises have gone up within city limits in the past decade. The city’s most famous stretch of skyline, including the jewel-box-like Jin Mao Tower and the purple rocket-shaped Pearl TV Tower, was a rice paddy just 20 years ago. Now some 130 million people live within a two and a half hour drive of downtown. Even the wild ideas get built here.

More here.

Laura Moorhead in Wired:

“Design like you give a damn.” That’s the signature line in the rousing stump speech often delivered by Cameron Sinclair, executive director of Architecture for Humanity. While others build luxe lofts and titanium-plated monoliths, Sinclair and fellow cofounder Kate Stohr use architecture to solve social and humanitarian problems. Since starting the nonprofit in 1999, Sinclair, a 32-year-old London-born architect, and Stohr, a 32-year-old American journalist, have led 30 projects in six countries. They’ve organized design competitions for refugee housing in Kosovo, mobile health clinics in sub-Saharan Africa, and a soccer clubhouse in South Africa that doubles as an HIV/AIDS outreach center.

More here.

Review of the book “Design Like You Give a Damn” here.

Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises. The motto of his group, Architecture for Humanity, is “Design like you give a damn.” Using a litany of striking examples, he shows how AFH has helped find creative solutions to humanitarian crises all over the globe. Sinclair then outlines his TED Prize wish: to create a global open-source network that will let architects and communities share and build designs to house the world.

Watch video here.

Jacob Hale Russell & John Jurgensen in The Wall Street Journal:

Paul Henry Smith, a conductor who studied as a teen under Leonard Bernstein, hopes to pull off an ambitious performance next year: conducting three Beethoven symphonies back-to-back in a live concert. “Doing Beethoven’s symphonies is how you prove your mettle,” he says.

But Mr. Smith’s proof comes with the help of a computerized baton. He will use it to lead an “orchestra” with no musicians — the product of a computer program designed by a former Vienna Philharmonic cellist and comprised of over a million recorded notes played by top musicians. …

Even some experts now find it hard to tell the difference. At the request of a Wall Street Journal reporter, David Liptak, chair of the composition department at the Eastman School of Music, listened to a 30-second passage of a Beethoven symphony created on a computer, as well as three versions recorded by live orchestras. On his first try at identifying the computerized version, Mr. Liptak guessed wrong. He says the difference became clear when he heard a longer clip (listen to the four sample passages).

More here.

Alison Gopnik at Slate:

A few months ago, a construction worker named Wesley Autrey leapt in front of a moving subway train in New York City to save a stranger who had just collapsed onto the tracks. Five days later, the New York Times speculated that this act of apparent altruism—”I just saw someone who needed help,” Autrey said—might be explained by a bunch of cells thought to exist in the human brain, called mirror neurons. …

Mirror neurons have become the “left brain/right brain” of the 21^st century. The idea that these cells could make a hero out of Wesley Autrey began with a genuine and important discovery about the brains of macaque monkeys. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, neuroscientists found a population of cells that fired whenever a monkey prepared to act but also when it watched another animal act. They called these cells “mirror neurons.” It didn’t take long for scientists and science writers to speculate that mirror neurons might serve as the physiological basis for a wide range of social behaviors, from altruism to art appreciation. Headlines like “Cells That Read Minds” or “How Brain’s ‘Mirrors’ Aid Our Social Understanding” tapped into our intuitions about connectedness. Maybe this cell, with its mellifluous name, gives us our special capacity to understand one another—to care, to learn, and to communicate. Could mirror neurons be responsible for human language, culture, empathy, and morality?

More here.

Amy Crawford in Smithsonian Magazine:

“During Derby Week, Louisville is the capital of the world,” wrote John Steinbeck in 1956. “The Kentucky Derby, whatever it is—a race, an emotion, a turbulence, an explosion—is one of the most beautiful and violent and satisfying things I have ever experienced.”

For generations, crowds have herded to Churchill Downs racetrack in Louisville on the first Saturday in May, with millions more tuning in to live television coverage. The Kentucky Derby, a 1-¼ mile race for 3-year-old Thoroughbred horses, is the longest continually held sporting event in the United States—the horses have run without interruption since 1875, even during both World Wars.

But for its first few decades, says Jay Ferguson, a curator at Louisville’s Kentucky Derby Museum, “the Derby wasn’t the horserace. Back around the turn of the century there were three horses in the race, and Churchill Downs had been losing money for every year it had been in existence.” It took savvy marketing, movie stars, southern tradition and luck to turn what could have been just another horse race into what many have called “the most exciting two minutes in sports.”

More here.

Joshua Roebke in Seed Magazine:

What is truth? How do we recognize it? Truth is a concept with which we are all pretty familiar. It is an undercurrent in every conversation and interaction we have with one another. Yet few of us ever give it much conscious thought except when we believe it is absent or in doubt. It’s one of those intangibles that, when it does come up, we typically speak of only in absolutes. A statement can be either true or false, and that is all.

Even when we do think about truth and admit to blends of gray between the black and white, we frequently have a sense that a true answer merely exists beyond our immediate grasp. Given sufficient information and time, we could all eventually figure out the veracity of any claim or idea. In the meantime, most of us are satisfied with our hunches. We have a gut feeling for what is correct and proceed with our lives content in our beliefs.

Part of the reason for our satisfaction probably stems from the difference between what we say is “true” and what we consider to be “truth.” The distinction isn’t just semantic nitpicking. “True” is what we say of a statement we agree with or believe in. “Truth” is a far more nebulous and fundamental concept. We understand it as more of an ideal toward which we strive, rather than one we hold any dominion over.

More here.

How government-sponsored groups masquerade as civil society.

Moisés Naím in Foreign Policy (via OliviaB):

The Myanmar Women’s Affairs Federation is a gongo. So is Nashi, a Russian youth group, and the Sudanese Human Rights Organization. Saudi Arabia’s International Islamic Relief Organization is also a gongo, as is Chongryon, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan. Gongos are everywhere, in China, Cuba, France, Tunisia, and even the United States.

Gongos are government-sponsored nongovernmental organizations. Behind this contradictory and almost laughable tongue twister lies an important and growing global trend that deserves more scrutiny: governments funding and controlling nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), often stealthily. Some gongos are benign, others irrelevant. But many, including those mentioned above, are dangerous. Some act as the thuggish arm of repressive governments. Others use the practices of democracy to subtly undermine democracy at home. Abroad, the gongos of repressive regimes lobby the United Nations and other international institutions, often posing as representatives of citizen groups with lofty aims when, in fact, they are nothing but agents of the governments that fund them. Some governments embed their gongos deep in the societies of other countries and use them to advance their interests abroad.

More here.

Via Political Theory Daily Review, how many honorary degrees separate George W. Bush from other, controversial leaders? In Foreign Policy:

In June of 1975, the Allahabad High Court in India found Prime Minister Indira Gandhi guilty of using the state appartus to win the 1971 elections. The Gandhian socialist JP Narayan agitated against the Prime Minister and mobilized mass protests against the government. In response to the Court and popular agitations, the Prime Minister declared a State of Emergency, began cracking down on civil liberties and opposition parties on the right, left and center, and brought Indian democracy to a halt. (That apparent admirer of the vile, vile Enver Hohxa, Mother Teresa, supported this new Indian dictatorship.) The Emergency ended 20 months after it was declared with new, fair elections. The resistance to the Emergency is taken to be a sign of the resilience of Indian electoral democracy. Now an Indian historian, Ramachandra Guha, argues that JP Narayan and the opposition to Gandhi are also to blame for the suspension of India’s democracy. In Outlook India:

In your Emergency chapter, you say that JP and Indira Gandhi wrote the script for the Emergency together, which suggests a kind of equivalence between their actions.

In a sense. Because Mrs Gandhi had the instruments of state at her command and because she grossly abused them through the Emergency, she would be the greater culprit. But one can’t let JP off the hook either. One placed too much faith in the state, and the other placed too little faith in the state and in representative institutions. One said I am Parliament, I am India, the other said disband Parliament…

You strongly suggest that the single biggest reason for Indira Gandhi calling elections in 1977 was western criticism of her and the Emergency. That’s interesting..

Yes, I do argue that. There are other reasons, too, but this is something no one has said before, and I have documented it, from the private letters by Horace Alexander, and public criticism by Fenner Brockway and John Grigg. Horace Alexander taught Indira Gandhi bird-watching. He was a Quaker, an emissary between Gandhi and the Raj. Fenner Brockway was a very important socialist and a very close friend of Nehru.

MONROVIA, Liberia—Jonathan Koffa, known to his fans as Takun J, wore fake diamond earrings and a rhinestone-studded D&G necklace that was missing most of its bling. One day in March, he and several other Liberian rappers gathered around a plastic table next to a blazing strip of asphalt in downtown Monrovia. Only a flimsy umbrella separated us from the punishing midday sun, and the musicians sweated into their do-rags.

They were members of L.I.B. Records, one of Liberia’s most popular rap outfits, which is not a record label in the traditional sense but a group of like-minded artists who sometimes perform together. Unlike the American rappers they admired—50 Cent, DMX, Jay-Z—their lives lacked any hint of glamour. Most were in their 20s and lived at home. They walked everywhere, because in Liberia, even a rapper with three simultaneous radio hits couldn’t afford a bicycle. On nights when he ran out of food, Takun J told me that he ate hot cereal with sugar before bed, just to have something in his stomach.

more from Slate here.

David Brooks was delighted by the response he received when he popped the Reinhold Niebuhr question to Barack Obama a week or so ago. “I love him.” Obama said. “He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” Needless to say, Brooks was impressed. “So I asked, What do you take away from him?”

“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”

more from TNR here.

‘You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’ The Jewish Writings make the matter of her political affiliation no less easy to settle. In these editorials, essays and unfinished pieces, she seeks to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. If the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely it is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. If the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative?

more from the LRB here.

From Science:

Researchers have used a new gene-hunting technique to pinpoint a novel genetic variant that raises some people’s odds of having a heart attack. The results, reported online today in Science, suggest a possible new contributor to heart disease and could lead to a genetic test to pinpoint people who are susceptible. Over the past decade, many genes have been reported to increase the risk of heart disease, but few of these findings have held up in subsequent studies. They found a genetic variant on chromosome 9 that was much more common in people who had suffered a heart attack. They and U.S. collaborators then confirmed the association in another Iceland sample and three U.S. groups totaling nearly 4600 cases and 12,800 controls.

A separate team found the same genetic clue. Researchers led by Ruth McPherson of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute in Canada and Jonathan Cohen of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas examined about 300 heart disease patients and 300 controls using 100,000 markers. The results, which point to the same gene on chromosome 9 fingered by deCODE, held up in five more groups of people in the U.S. and Denmark. Given that two separate teams found evidence for the same variant in a large number of sick people, “one can be absolutely confident that this risk allele is real,” says McPherson.

The results could eventually help doctors predict which individuals are prone to heart problems.

More here.

From Science:

Researchers have developed a way to vaccinate mice against deadly prion diseases, which include scrapie, kuru, mad cow disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The findings, presented today at the annual American Academy of Neurology meeting in Boston, suggest that these degenerative brain diseases can be stopped if caught early enough.

Searching for a more effective vaccine, a team led by neuropathologist Thomas Wisniewski of the New York University School of Medicine in New York City took a new approach. They genetically modified a strain of Salmonella bacteria to express prion proteins. When researchers fed these bacteria to mice, the bugs multiplied in the rodents’ guts, and the animals developed antibodies against the prions. A month later, the researchers fed the mice disease-causing prions; mice that had developed antibodies against the prion proteins stayed healthy for the remainder of the study, 400 days, while those not inoculated with the modified Salmonella developed a degenerative brain disease, like mad cow disease, and died within 200 days.

More here.

For Hart Crane’s first book of poems, the slender White Buildings (1926), there was a whole bouquet of reviews to die for. True, the owlish Edmund Wilson was not impressed: “almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style which was, not merely not applied to a great subject, but not, so far as one can see, applied to any subject at all.” But he was outnumbered by the reviewers who trumpeted Crane’s arrival: Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Mark Van Doren, Archibald MacLeish, Matthew Josephson, and still others—several of them already Crane’s friends.

It may not have been all to Crane’s good that his advent was greeted with so much rapture and so little circumspection. (“Not since Whitman,” intoned Frank in The New Republic, “has so original, so profound and . . . so important a poetic promise come to the American scene.”) Crane’s belief in himself, already huge, ballooned astronomically.

more from Boston Review here.

NOTHING, I remember nothing,” the middle-aged witness insisted to the court. “I was sick during the genocide.” She was standing before a man accused of multiple murders, an audience of her neighbors, and a row of judges at a session of gacaca, one of nine thousand local sessions set up by the Rwandan government in 2001 to try tens of thousands charged with participating in the 1994 genocide. On a Saturday last June, some thirty people from surrounding farms gathered outside a small government building tucked into a space between fields to participate in the trials of three prisoners. The scene was bucolic when I arrived—lush fields, twittering birds, butterflies. The simple structure, a galvanized roof over wooden benches, looked oddly like a picnic pavilion in a quiet American park. But the serenity was belied by the tense silence that hung over the crowd, as everyone waited to begin. The prisoners sat in front. One, a stooped middle-aged man, was nervous and fidgety; the other two, in their mid to late twenties, affected aggressive indifference.

more from Dissent here.

After Brodsky’s arrest and trial on charges of “parasitism” in 1964, Akhmatova famously commented that “our redhead is making quite a biography for himself”. The remark was prescient. In a detailed treatment of the accusations, trial and sentence Losev argues persuasively that Brodsky, whose poetry had scarcely made it into official or even samizdat print, was a most unlikely target for persecution. In the backlash against Khrushchev’s short-lived thaw, as Losev explains, KGB lackeys were quick to exploit opportunities for advancement. Brodsky fell victim to the careerist ambitions of one lowly operative who orchestrated the charges that led to his conviction (after two harrowing incarcerations in psychiatric hospitals) and internal exile (after passage through two notorious prisons) to a tiny village in the Archangel region. Exile turned out to be the start of a formative creative period in which Brodsky countered isolation by steeping himself in English and American poets such as Hardy, Frost, Auden and Eliot: all masters of the first-person voice that Brodsky would soon make his own. Although Brodsky’s poetry always seemed to be evolving in new directions, Losev observes that the essays on Frost, Rilke, Tsvetaeva and Pasternak that Brodsky published from the 1980s on were based on work undertaken some thirty years earlier.

more from the TLS here.

Anne Enright in the London Review of Books:

Last year, when she was five, my daughter announced that she was going to become a Muslim.

‘It’s an awful lot of washing,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry, I am able to reach the sink with my feet.’ She went up to her room and stuck six sheets of paper together to make a prayer mat. It was time, I decided, to send her to Catholic Instruction. This is an after-school class that, besides fulfilling her tribal spiritual needs, provides a solid half-hour of free childcare, every Monday. It is conducted by a catechetics expert in lace-up shoes who looks like she means business. When I drove my daughter home after her first class, she was quite unhinged, muttering like an old gossip and quietly raving in the back of the car.

‘I didn’t know he was arrested,’ she said.

‘What? Who?’

‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I knew they killed him all right. I just didn’t know they arrested him first.’

Hot news. It is still a great story, it seems.

More here.

From CNN:

Stace Owens has no intention of leaving this world when he dies. He plans to stick around for decades or longer, preserved in plastic and displayed in a museum or medical school.

The 33-year-old real estate agent is among more than 7,000 people who have agreed to donate their bodies for plastination, a process in which body fluids are replaced by liquid plastic. The plastic hardens, leaving tissues intact and allowing bodies to be displayed in their natural color and without formaldehyde.

The process was made popular by Gunther von Hagens’ “Body Worlds,” a controversial anatomy exhibit that puts real human specimens on view. Most are flayed and dissected, revealing their organs. Others are kept intact and displayed in dramatic action poses, such as a basketball player driving to the hoop or a runner in full stride.

More here.