Doris Lessing, the Persian-born, Rhodesian-raised and London-residing novelist whose deeply autobiographical writing has swept across continents and reflects her deep feminist engagement with the major social and political issues, won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature today.

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy described her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” The award comes with a 10 million Swedish crown honorarium, about $1.6 million.

Ms. Lessing, who turns 88 later this month, never finished high school and largely educated herself through her voracious reading. She had been born to British parents in what is now Iran, was raised in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and now lives in London. She has written dozens of books of fiction, as well as plays, non-fiction and an autobiography. She is the 11th woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature.

more from the NY Times here.

There is plenty in Julie Heffernan’s paintings to delight a traditionalist — and to offend a modernist.

Ms. Heffernan, currently on view at P.P.O.W, is a shameless virtuoso, deploying extraordinary, painstaking and yet unforced skill in descriptions of flora and fauna, and of feminine flesh,. Her display of technique is as wanton as the still-life motifs she piles on: Typically, in images that reek of opulence and overload, a comely young woman is nude but for a fantastical skirt composed of a pyramid-like mound of foul, game, fruits, jewelry, and flowers.

There is an old master look to these highly wrought works, generally around 6-feet high by 5-feet, which is beyond mere quotation or irony. . The specific points of reference are geographically and historically diverse, from Northern Renaissance to French Rococo, although the median look is Baroque. But they do not seem to be opting for anachronism per se. The use of old painterly languages is less tongue-in-cheek than hand-on-heart — a means of accessing a dreamlike space of high imagination.

more from artcritical here.

“Of purely antiquarian interest”. The phrase itself smells musty now. We are no longer so confident of being able to identify a dominant historical narrative and relegate the rubbish to the dustbin of history. To us now the dustbin is history, and we are its scavengers – some professional totters, others mere amateur fossickers. Every boffin hopes to be a golden dustman, rescuing from pollen residues and crockery shards the reality that has eluded old-style, document-bound historians. It is political history which now has to compete for airtime with the history of food and families, of dress, disease and death. As David Starkey points out in his introduction to this irresistible show, it is this “thinginess” which has given the Royal Society of Antiquaries its peculiar flavour and accounts for its unique contribution to our modern understanding, both scholarly and popular, of the past. Until the 1920s, the Society’s principal meeting-room was arranged, not like a lecture room, but like an anatomy theatre: seats were ranged around a huge table on which the “Remains of Antient Workmanship” were placed to be viewed, argued about and anatomized. It was things, not theses, they looked at first and foremost.

more from the TLS here.

From Nature:

The less often a word is said, the faster it will change over time, whereas more-often uttered words are resistant to change. In this week’s Nature, two groups publish analyses of this trend, which quantify it and compare it with biological evolution. The idea that aspects of culture might ‘evolve’ in in a similar way as biological organisms dates back to Darwin himself. The notion was given a big push forwards in 1976, when Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of ‘memes’ — aspects of culture or fashion that “propagate themselves … by leaping from brain to brain”.

“There is this general idea that culture evolves, but it is more of a metaphor than something that has teeth — that obeys precise mathematical rules,” says Erez Lieberman, a specialist in evolutionary maths at Harvard University. Lieberman was struck by this idea when he learned that the ten most common verbs in English (be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, get) are all irregular. Instead of their past tenses ending in ‘-ed’, as do 97% of English verbs, they take the peculiar forms of was, had, did, went, said, could, would, saw, took and got. Researchers suppose that this is because often-used irregulars are easy to remember and get right. Seldom-used irregulars, on the other hand, are more likely to be forgotten, so speakers often mistakenly apply the ‘-ed’ rule. The most commonly used word that they found this happened to was the verb ‘to help’ – the past tense used to be ‘holp’, but is now ‘helped’.

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From BBC News:

In a speech to the recent Labour Party conference, Environment Secretary Hilary Benn outlined government plans to phase out the sale of the traditional bulbs in the UK by 2011. Mr Benn’s announcement follows on from the decision made by the Australian government in February to ban the bulbs by 2009.

Theo van Deursen, chief executive of Philips Lighting, says the target is based on the simple formula of customers-saving-energy equals customers-saving-money. “Globally, 19% of electricity is used for lighting,” he told BBC News. “We think you could save 40% of that, which means there are potentially huge savings.” While there seems to be consensus on the home front, Mr van Deursen believes more attention needs to be paid to the way we light our cities. Mr van Deursen says the demand for lighting is only going to increase as more and more people live in cities.

A number of cities, including London, Sydney and Paris, have staged mass switch-offs as a symbolic gesture to highlight the problem of energy waste. But Mr van Deursen says switching off is not the answer. “If you think of major urban areas with 20 million people, if you switch all the lights off then you get a lot of crime and vandalism, and that is not what we want,” he explained. “There is modern technology that means you can do the job in a much better way.” He cites the London Borough of Redbridge as an area that is benefiting from using new ways of lighting its streets. “The light quality has improved a lot and there have been energy savings of 50%. House prices in the street went up because people love to live in a street that is nicely lit.”

More here.

Stephen T. Asma in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Philosophy broods, analyzes, and tends toward the antisocial; pop culture celebrates, wallows, and tends toward the communal. Philosophy is for cynics, and pop culture is for bimbos.

But the recent trend in publishing, dominated by Open Court and Blackwell, has tried to undo those old stereotypes. Perhaps its chief architect, or hardest worker, is William Irwin, an associate professor of philosophy at King’s College, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Irwin was the series editor of Open Court’s “Popular Culture and Philosophy” from 2003 to 2007, generating more than 20 titles, including The Sopranos and Philosophy, Harry Potter and Philosophy, and The Beatles and Philosophy. Open Court’s series originated when the press’s editorial director, David Ramsay Steele, decided to follow up on the success of the one-off Seinfeld and Philosophy. The Open Court series is currently being edited by George Reisch, an instructor at Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies, and the ever-busy William Irwin has moved on to Blackwell, where he’s put seven new titles on the docket for 2007 alone in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series.

Philosophers, who devote much of their attention to remote texts, are seen by many as irretrievably elitist. But elitism isn’t always bad. Professional sprinters, for example, are an elite group, too, but nobody holds it against them.

If it were only cultural bias that shaped philosophy, then it would seem high time to overthrow the old hegemons Kant, Aristotle, Hegel, and their ilk, and open the doors to Buffy, Bart, and Neo. In fact, an entire branch of cultural studies is devoted to destroying the old hierarchies of high culture over pop culture…

More here.

Photographs by Daniel Laine:

There are still several hundred monarchs on this continent. While some amongst them have been relegated to the level of touristic curiousities, others still maintain significant traditional and spiritual power. Born of dynasties which marked the history of Africa until the twentieth century, these kings are the source of underground power with which “modern governments” have to exist. Contrary to the Indian Maharajas, they have survived the upheavals of history, and evolve in a parallel world but which is very real.

However, for some Africans, they are the shameful incarnation of the failure of archaic systems in the face of western colonization. They are blamed for their tribal conservatism which blocks the passage of traditional African societies toward modern states. For others, they are the guarantors of old cultural bases, the ultimate rampart before the anguish of an uncertain and tumultuous future. Be that as it may, they are still a presence in the countries, a reality that needs to be included.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

J.M. Coetzee is a cold fish, and James Wood is a hot fish. No one’s going to do anything about that. These are men who are firmly what they are. Hume once said that philosophies ultimately boil down to personalities. It is an insight that sounds trite when you’re young and looking for complicated answers, but it gets deeper with the years. But because they are two of the most astute literary minds of our times at the height of their powers, their respective hotnesses and coldnesses are worthy of further scrutiny.

The publication of J.M. Coetzee’s most recent collection of essays (Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005) provides an opportunity for the study of these two minds, two moods, two styles. This is because it just so happens that Wood and Coetzee are interested in many of the same literary figures. And not only are they interested in the same figures, but they’re also interested in the same figures for many of the same reasons. Take, for instance, Italo Svevo. You wouldn’t necessarily think that a secondary and quirky figure of early 20th century fiction would inspire the deepest thoughts about the function and purpose of modern literature. But it so turns out that for both Wood and Coetzee, Svevo serves as a kind of key to their projects in general.

Svevo was an Italian writer whose comic novels were first introduced to a wider readership by James Joyce’s, and who has since become celebrated among those who know him as a master at portraying the delightfully screwed up workings of the human psyche. That, in fact, is exactly what both Wood and Coetzee value in Svevo. More specifically, Coetzee and Wood are both taken with the way in which Svevo was able to enter the world of his literary creations with complete sympathy while at the same time exposing those characters as messes of internal contradictions and self-delusions.

More here.

Rebecca Milzoff in New York Magazine:

“Isn’t the East Village sort of like Beauty and the Beast in the summer?” Nico Muhly exclaims. “You know, ‘Bonjour, good day, how is your family, how is your wife … ’ ” It’s our first outing of several together, and we are walking at typical Nico pace—an excitable, bouncier version of the New York Walk. In the span of three blocks, we have passed four people he knows, including a member of the indie rock band Ratatat, and soon we will be picking up a score from composer Philip Glass, Muhly’s de facto boss, who’s eating dinner at the vegetarian kosher Indian joint Madras.

In Muhly’s world, Houston Street as Disney movie makes sense. His life is an odd fairy tale in which he inhabits several characters at all times. There is, first and foremost, Nico the Composer, who has since age 18 assisted Glass, conducting and editing his film scores, and has also emerged as a star in his own right, with an album of his own work, Speaks Volumes; Nico the Helper to Famous Singers, who “enables” the likes of Björk, Antony, and Rufus Wainwright; and Nico Himself, the sweet, gleeful downtown kid, the 26-year-old Columbia and Juilliard graduate in perpetual motion. That last Nico lives in a Chinatown loft (above a sweatshop–cum–mah-jongg parlor), with his cats Duane and Reade and a roommate, Liz, whom he’s known since they were kids.

More here.

Toni Feder in Physics Today:

At dusk each winter evening, millions of starlings fly in from the countryside to their roosting sites in Rome and, before settling into trees for the night, “they spend something like 20 minutes doing these incredible aerial displays. It’s a truly amazing sight,” says Andrea Cavagna, a statistical physicist at Italy’s National Institute for the Physics of Condensed Matter (INFM). “If you watch a flock of starlings under attack by a predator, they split, merge, and do all these incredible maneuvers to confuse the predator. How can they keep cohesion in the face of that strong perturbation—the attack?”

Inspired by the aerial displays, a group of scientists led by theoretical physicists in Rome set up StarFlag, a multidisciplinary, multinational collaboration to study the birds’ flocking behavior. The main aim was to determine “the fundamental laws of collective behavior and self-organization of animal aggregations in three dimensions,” says Cavagna, the project’s deputy coordinator.

More here.

You could begin the story of Todd Haynes’s Dylan movie at the very beginning, about seven years ago, while Haynes was driving cross-country in his beat-up old Honda. But since Todd Haynes’s film about Dylan is as much about Todd Haynes as it is about Dylan (or maybe even more); and since Haynes is a filmmaker who, in midcareer at age 46, is doing his best to take the experimental into the multiplex; and, further, since those who don’t like the film are likely to consider it a kind of gorgeous indulgence, a bizarre experiment, the temptation is to skip the ordinary narrative introduction and begin at the end, or very near the end, in this case in the last few days of filming, on the outskirts of Montreal, where, way in the back of a dark and cavernous and disused factory, there was a white glowing light, like something in a dream. We begin then with an image — an image that is all about, believe it or not, the relationship between Haynes and his film, between Dylan and Haynes, between the artist and the subject he is trying to portray.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

So, I’m standing astride this 548ft crack that that has rather alarmingly appeared in the floor of Tate Modern. I’m with an architect and a couple of builders, and we are examining the crack from a wide variety of angles and sticking our fingers inside and giving it a damn good poke and generally trying very hard indeed to work a few things out. The first is: how on earth did it get here? The second is: could it be dangerous? This being the Tate, we also feel obliged, finally, to consider the possibility that it might be art.

more from The Observer here.

In her 1967 essay “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag points to a growing tendency among writers to create work that tries “to out-talk language, or to talk oneself into silence.” This “devaluation of language”—due in part to the “unlimited ‘technological reproduction’ of both printed language and speech” as well as “the degenerations of public language within the realms of politics and advertising and entertainment”—has only increased over the past four decades. So, too, has artists’ tendency to reclaim mass-cultural language and use it against itself. Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw and Sarah Manguso’s Siste Viator, two second books from a pair of our finest younger poets, exemplify two ways in which poets repurpose “contaminated” public language to make of it something insightful, instructive, consoling, and even beautiful.

more from Boston Review here.

From Prospect Magazine:

In July, Gordon Brown published a green paper called “The Governance of Britain.” The final section said that we need to be clearer about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and what it means to be British. It proposed “to work with the public to develop a British statement of values.” We asked 50 writers and intellectuals to give us their thoughts on this statement and what should inform it.

Rushanara Ali Think-tanker: The government’s initiatives on citizenship and a statement of British values have been met with a mix of encouragement and scepticism. Inevitably, the scepticism revolves around whether there are such things as British values given that so many of our values are shaped by more universal values, and no single nation has a monopoly over the ideas of democracy, equality and the principles of human rights. But the real test of whether a statement of values is meaningful will be based on our everyday experience, whether we are genuinely treated equally as citizens, whether we feel a sense of belonging and pride in who are as a nation. That means taking practical steps to enable the whole population to be a part of the national story, as opposed to the current situation, where many feel they are outsiders and lack a sense of belonging.

More here.

From Nature:

Two researchers who discovered an effect that has dramatically shrunk the size of magnetic storage devices have won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics. Albert Fert of the University of Paris-South in France and Peter Grünberg of Jülich Research Centre in Germany split the prize for their 1988 discovery of an effect called giant magnetoresistance (GMR). The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the award on 9 October in Stockholm. The effect has been heralded as one of the first major applications of the fields of nanotechnology and ‘spintronics’.At the heart of GMR are the spins of electrons, which generate a magnetic field and can be aligned either up or down. An electron can easily pass through a material whose electrons are similarly aligned, but will encounter resistance when it passes through one with electrons aligned in the opposite direction.

This led to devices that are very sensitive to tiny magnetic fields. A hard disc drive stores bits on its surface as a pattern of magnetic fields. Until the discovery of GMR, hard discs used metal induction coils to read out the data. But the laws of induction meant that the coils, and thus the bits, had to be quite large. GMR opened up a way to build much smaller magnetic heads, says Claude Chappert of the University of Paris-South. The discovery revolutionized consumer electronics. “I think this triggered the common use of MP3 players,” he notes.

More here.

Any day now Craig Venter – geneticist, yachtsman and Vietnam veteran – will announce that he has achieved one of the greatest feats in science: the creation of artificial life. He talks to Ed Pilkington.

From The Guardian:

For a room in which one of the most astonishing experiments in modern science is being conducted, the laboratory in the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, is understated. It is divided into wooden workstations reminiscent of a school science lab. There are stacks of glass test tubes and pipettes, and one wall is lined with air-controlled boxes containing Petri dishes. Petri dishes! The mere sight of them sparks memories of interminable, soporific biology lessons.

But there is nothing soporific about what is going on inside these Petri dishes. If all goes according to plan – and the full expectation is that it will – their surface will bloom imminently with an array of small white spots that will herald a giant leap in scientific and human potential. Each spot will contain up to 10m bacterial cells, and in each cell there will be a chromosome that has been painstakingly stitched together by humans from lab-made chemicals.

In short, those schoolboy Petri dishes will contain the first artificial life form ever created.

Casting a paternal eye over the proceedings, like an expectant father pacing the delivery room, is the imposing figure of Craig Venter – the scientist variously described as a rebel, maverick, outsider, and the Bono of genetics.

More here.

“This is the kind of reporting we so desperately need: free of false bravura, free of agenda, free of inflated urgency. Gilbertson … shows us personally and incontrovertibly what it has been like for him coming of age in Iraq during the last five years.

“For this reason, the book belongs less with other histories of the war than on the same shelf with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This is not trumped-up news coming live from Iraq but the straight story with harrowing snapshots of the American soul. When future generations look back and wonder where we went wrong, where we failed ourselves and them, it will not be hours of television and radio broadcasts that they pore over. It will be a select few texts, and Gilbertson’s book deserves to be one of them.”

Ted Genoways, Mother Jones

More here.

Via American Scientist:

MIT’s OpenCourseWare project began in 1999, when provost Robert Brown charged the school’s Council on Education Technology with finding a space in the distance learning market. Spearheaded by computer science professor Hal Abelson, the project launched a pilot site in 2002 with 32 courses, and a year later the university published its 500th course online. Today the total count approaches 2,000.

The initiative, which provides reading lists, lecture notes, homework assignments and sometimes even streamed video lectures, stops well short of providing a full free MIT degree, but it supports the school’s mission to advance knowledge and to serve the nation and the world.

It’s an amazingly rich and generous resource. Users can access the courses online, download them for offline use, adopt them as teaching resources and even modify and redistribute them (noncommercially, and with credit). The course list ranges from history and literature to statistical thermodynamics and computational geometry—nearly all the courses in the catalog—and many are even offered in translation. MIT’s program is a leader in the open educational resource movement, which seeks to create a global intellectual commons, and it’s an example to be admired.

Browse the courses here.

Ruchira Paul in Shunya’s Notes:

The history of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in North America….is widely believed to be of relatively recent vintage.  Until now I was under the impression that the earliest group of small but ethnically significant number of Indians to settle in the US were the Sikh farmers of Yuba valley in central California in the early part of the twentieth century. The next wave of Indians (and Pakistanis) to arrive were mostly doctors, scientists and other professionals in the 1960s when immigration laws were loosened to admit more non-Europeans into the US. Since then Indians have emigrated to the US in steady numbers, their demographics changing gradually to include small businessmen, financiers, bankers and IT personnel. Unlike some other groups of immigrants who have fled their countries due to dangerous political / ethnic /religious strifes, Indian immigration to the US has been and continues to be voluntary – largely undertaken for economic reasons. Until now I was not aware of “involuntary” transportation of south Asians to America. It was therefore extremely surprising to discover that Asian Indians were present in American colonies as early as the beginning of the 17th century, brought here by British colonists as their indentured servants or personal slaves.

More here.

Daniel Titinger in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

I explain that few people are even aware that Suriname exists, yet, far away, kicking a ball about the firmament where the stars of European soccer shine, Edgar Davids, Patrick Kluivert, Clarence Seedorf, Ruud Gullit, Frank Rijkaard are famous names. They have Suriname in their past, but the jerseys they wear, or did wear, are Dutch. Suriname doesn’t have much, but the gods of today wear shorts, kick balls, and bask in the aura of the flat screen: Who in Europe hasn’t seen Davids, Kluivert, Seedorf, Gullit or Rijkaard on tv? There are countries twice the size of Suriname without half its number of celebrity names. Those who do know Suriname know it only because somewhere they heard its key legend: Suriname produces soccer players the way Venezuela produces oil.

The planet is a ball, I explain, and its movements are governed by strange laws. Why does Suriname produce brilliant soccer players? Why is there no professional soccer in Suriname? It’s hard to say. If the legend’s true, Suriname sires gods who are worshipped in the stadiums of Holland. However, the soccer back home is strictly amateur and no better known than Suriname itself. This could be the country’s greatest paradox: its prize exports kick soccer balls and carry Dutch passports. If these sons of Suriname were true ambassadors for their home country, the nation would shed its anonymity on the strength of what it no longer owns.

More here.