From Nature:

Butterflies that trick ants into helping to raise their young are driving an evolutionary arms race between the two species, researchers have found. The discovery is important to the conservation of rare Alcon blue butterfies, they say. Maculinea alcon butterflies infect the nests of Myrmica ants by hatching caterpillars nearby, hoping that the caterpillars will be ‘adopted’ and cared for by ants that mistake them for their own young. The caterpillars achieve this by mimicking the surface chemistry of the ants. Getting this chemistry right is important: if an ant doesn’t recognize a caterpillar as one of its own it will eat it, says David Nash, a zoologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Successfully adopted caterpillars are bad for the ant colonies, as ants may neglect their own young in favour of the intruders. But the ants are fighting back. “The ant larvae seem to be evolving as a result of being parasitized,” says Nash. “It’s an ongoing evolutionary arms race.”

More here.

For Bhaijan:

For Bibi:

For Aps:

For Ga:

Part 2:

Dennis Normile in ScienceNOW:

The countries planning the world’s biggest fusion experiment have learned not to count on the United States. So this week’s decision by the U.S. Congress to strip out a planned $149 million contribution in 2008 to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) won’t halt next year’s planned start of the project in Cadarache, France (ScienceNOW, 18 December). But ITER officials say that they will miss the 9% U.S. share if the latest budget decision means that the United States is pulling out–for the second time–of the $12 billion project.

“I don’t think there would be a big impact on the overall ITER plan” if the U.S. contribution is delayed, says Hiroki Matsuo, director for fusion energy at Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. He says that the project is at the stage at which partners are making components, and rescheduling could accommodate a late part or two. It would be a more serious matter if the United States withdraws from ITER or fails to provide the funding it has promised, says Norbert Holtkamp, principal deputy director-general of the ITER organization. Even then, however, Holtkamp says a 9% hole in the budget “will do harm, but it’s not going to kill” ITER. The European Union, as host, has agreed to provide 49% of the budget, with the other partners–Japan, China, India, Russia, South Korea, and the United States–divvying up the rest.

Martha Biondi in In These Times:

A Stanford University computer scientist named John Koza has formulated a compelling and pragmatic alternative to the Electoral College. It’s called National Popular Vote (NPV), and has been hailed as “ingenious” by two New York Times editorials. In April, Maryland became the first state to pass it into law. And several other states, including Illinois and New Jersey, are likely to follow suit.

How NPV works is this: Instead of a state awarding its electors to the top vote-getter in that state’s winner-take-all presidential election, the state would give its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. This would be perfectly legal because the U.S. Constitution grants states the right to determine how to cast their electoral votes, so no congressional or federal approval would be required. NPV could go into effect nationwide as soon as enough states pass it (enough states to tally 270 electoral votes—the magic number needed to elect a president). In 2008, NPV bills are expected to be introduced in all 50 states.

“We’ll have it by 2012,” says Robert Richie, executive director of the reform group Fair Vote.

Pierre Bayard in The Guardian:

It is unsurprising that so few texts extol the virtues of talking about books without having read them. To address this subject demands courage, because doing so clashes inevitably with a series of internalised constraints. Three of these, at least, are crucial.

The first might be called the obligation to read. We still live in a society where reading, on the decline though it may be, remains the object of a kind of worship. This worship applies particularly to a number of canonical texts – the list varies according to the circles you move in – which it is practically forbidden not to have read if you want to be taken seriously.

The second constraint, similar to the first but nonetheless distinct, might be called the obligation to read thoroughly. If it’s frowned upon not to read, it’s almost as bad to read quickly or to skim, and especially to say so. For example, it’s virtually unthinkable for literary intellectuals to acknowledge that they have flipped through Proust’s work without having read it in its entirety – though this is certainly the case for most of them.

The third constraint concerns the way we discuss books.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

But another secret of a movement like National Socialism is that its appeal is eclectic. Not everyone who admired Hitler bought the whole package. The regime was able to appeal to patriotism, a hunger for leadership, a generalized xenophobia, a distrust of parliamentary democracy, populist disdain for elites and high culture, and, as the war progressed, fear and hatred of Russia and Bolshevism. Indeed, there was among some Germans a tendency to absolve Hitler from responsibility for the horrors committed in his name – “If only the Führer knew . . .”. The stubborn defence that German forces put up on the Eastern Front, even when the war was manifestly lost, prolonged the time in which the Final Solution could be pursued, but that was not the primary reason for this resistance. For the fanatics, the Red Army did indeed represent the military arm of “Judæo-Bolshevism”; for the rest, whether civilian or in uniform, it consisted of “Asiatic hordes” or “inhuman Orientals”, a stereotype reinforced by the experience of Occupation in 1945.

That the ideological driving force behind Hitler and his hard-core entourage was “redemptive anti-Semitism” is a proposition we can accept. No other explanation can tell us why the Holocaust was pursued with such relentless, escalating and ultimately counterproductive thoroughness, or why the Nazi leadership appeared to be convinced that Jews commanded the agenda of both Soviet Bolshevism and British and American capitalism.

more from the TLS here.

Alfred Döblin’s great novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929, is pretty much untranslatable. Much of it is written in the working-class argot of pre-war Berlin. A translator can ignore this, of course, and use plain English, but then you lose the flavor of the original. Or he can go for an approximation, adopting a kind of Brooklynese, for example, but this would not evoke Döblin’s louche Berlin milieu so much as Damon Runyon’s New York.[1] John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, set in eighteenth-century London, was successfully reworked by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill into a Weimar Berlin masterpiece, but that wasn’t a translation; it was a transformation, of place and time.

more from the NYRB here.

Novelists and poets, those interpreters of our troubled experience of the world, are often drawn to philosophical systems, theories of history, mythologies. Long works, in particular, require considerable formal organization, and so Dante relies on Aquinas and Catholic theology to structure his vision of the afterlife, just as Victor Hugo and Tolstoy embed powerful discourses about history in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and War and Peace. Similarly, Yeats’s late poetry turns on the detailed cosmology he elaborates in A Vision while Robert Graves’s best love poems celebrate the somber mythos of The White Goddess: “There is one story and one story only.” Sometimes the writers truly believe in these various systems, sometimes the systems merely serve as useful architectural blueprints to produce original and coherent works of art. Of course, what matters most is that the resulting novel or poem, through its use of such theoretical struts and joists, can somehow do an even better job than usual of, say, breaking our hearts.

John Crowley is on record as stating that he doesn’t believe in magic, even though his two most ambitious novels deal extensively with Faery (Little, Big, 1981) and the occult theories of Renaissance Hermeticism (the four-part Aegypt sequence, just completed with Endless Things).

more from The American Scholar here.

From the BBC:

Nicholas Schmidle in the New York Times Magazine:

One day last month, I climbed onto a crowded rooftop in Quetta, near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and wedged myself among men wearing thick turbans and rangy beards until I could find a seat. We converged on the rooftop that afternoon to attend the opening ceremony for Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam’s campaign office in this dusty city in the southwestern province of Baluchistan. Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, better known by its abbreviation, J.U.I., is a hard-line Islamist party, widely considered a political front for numerous jihadi organizations, including the Taliban. In the last parliamentary elections here, in 2002, the J.U.I. formed a national coalition with five other Islamist parties and led a campaign that was pro-Taliban, anti-American and spiked with promises to implement Shariah, or Islamic law. The alliance, known as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, or M.M.A., won more than 10 percent of the popular vote nationwide — the highest share ever for an Islamist bloc in Pakistan. The alliance formed governments in two of the country’s four provinces, including Baluchistan.

More here.

From Slate:

Buy a hog? An entire hog? Cut it up and put the pieces in a freezer? I’m a fan of Michael Pollan’s work, but he does have a tendency to hurtle himself into the stratosphere like an errant missile, then plummet back to earth and casually pick up where he left off. This time it’s on Page 168 of his latest book, In Defense of Food: One minute he’s carefully explaining the difference between “free-range” and “pastured” eggs, the next minute he’s perched on his own private planet brandishing a grocery list that might as well be headed “carrots, magic.” He acknowledges the possibility that some readers might not have room at home to install a hog-sized freezer, but that pretty much concludes the reality-based portion of this suggestion. Two pages later and he’s off again, explaining why it’s a good idea to go foraging in the wild for your salad greens. Pollan has been called an elitist for years, and his critics are bound to seize on the new book as fuel. But these bouts of the surreal don’t reflect his politics, they reflect his religion—the holy, catholic, and apostolic church of food, where only martyrs and lost souls have to shop at Safeway.

There’s always been a streak of the willfully impractical in Pollan’s worldview. Like the other great, radical writers whose subject is the death grip of the food industry—Joan Gussow, Marion Nestle, Eric Schlosser—he’s eloquent and persuasive; but come the revolution, he probably doesn’t belong on the tactics-and-logistics committee. What he likes best is spinning long, mesmerizing tales from his immense research, as he did in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the book that made him a star. It’s a beautifully handled polemic against modern agribusiness until you get to the last chapter, the one that’s supposed to bring it all home.

More here.

From Discover:

Tucked away in the cabinets of Oliver Sacks’s Greenwich Village office are hundreds of small black notebooks, each filled with jottings and sketches, newspaper clippings, and photos. These are the accumulated reflections from a lifetime spent observing the extraordinary ways the human brain can misfire and misbehave: a man who believes his own leg does not belong to him, an autistic woman with a gift for understanding animals, and the man who mistook his wife for a hat—the case that inspired one of Sacks’s most famous books.

What people may not know about Sacks, however, is that the 74-year-old neurologist has spent much of his career regularly treating patients in mental-health facilities around New York City. Those patients have more commonplace problems such as dementia, sciatica, gait disorders, and seizures. In his latest book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Sacks focuses on unusual cases having to do with music’s effects on the mind, such as a man who found relief from Tourette’s syndrome by playing the drums, and another who was driven to the edge by an unwelcome and unending tune that cycled uncontrollably through his head.

More here.

Over at ReasonOnline, Kerry Howley interviews Laura María Agustín, author of Sex at the Margins.

Collective anxiety about women who traverse sexual and spatial boundaries is anything but new. As Agustín writes, “Women who cross borders have long been viewed as deviant, so perhaps the present-day panic about the sexuality of women is not surprising.” Immigrants are human beings with the courage to leave the comforts of home. In Sex at the Margins, Agustín asks readers to leave behind easy stereotypes about migrants and welcome the overlooked expats among us.

reason spoke with Agustín in December.

reason: What experiences led you to write Sex at the Margins? 

Laura María Agustín: I was working in NGOs and social projects on the Mexico/US Border, the Caribbean, and in South America. I worked with people who called themselves sex workers and gays having sex with tourists. To us, this was normal, conventional. Everyone talked about it. Obviously many of these people didn’t have many options. Some of them had the guts to travel, and I felt I understood that.

In ’94 I hadn’t heard the word the work trafficking in this context. In the sex context, it’s a creation of the past 10 years. I started running into the term when I came to Europe and saw what people who were trying to help migrants were doing and saying. The whole idea of migrants who sell sex being victims was so different from what I knew. My original research question was, why is there such a big difference between what people in Europe say about people who sell sex, and what those people themselves say about themselves? It took a while for me to answer that question.

Via Crooked Timber, philosophy bites has an interview with the Marxist philosopher Gerald Cohen.

Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times:

A few months ago I wrote a magazine article about scientists who are building robots capable of a rudimentary form of sociability. As part of my research, I spent a few days at the humanoid robotics laboratory at M.I.T. And I admit: I developed a little crush on one of the robots. The object of my affection was Domo, a man-size machine with a buff torso and big blue eyes, a cross between He-Man and the Chrysler Building; when it gripped my hand in its strong rubbery pincers I felt a kind of thrill. So I was primed for the basic premise of David Levy’s provocative new book, “Love and Sex With Robots”: that there will soon come a day when people fall in love with robots and want them for companions, friends, love objects and possibly even partners for sex and marriage.

That day is imminent, Levy writes, especially the sex part. By the middle of this century, he predicts, “love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.”

If this seems a bit much, hang on. Levy, an expert on artificial intelligence and the author of “Robots Unlimited,” builds his case gradually. He begins with what scientists know about why humans fall in love with other humans. There are 10 factors, he writes, including mystery, reciprocal liking, and readiness to enter a relationship. Why can’t these factors apply to robots, too?

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Has man’s conquest of space increased or diminished his stature?”[1] The question raised is addressed to the layman, not the scientist, and it is inspired by the humanist’s concern with man, as distinguished from the physicist’s concern with the reality of the physical world. To understand physical reality seems to demand not only the renunciation of an anthropocentric or geocentric world view, but also a radical elimination of all anthropomorphic elements and principles, as they arise either from the world given to the five human senses or from the categories inherent in the human mind. The question assumes that man is the highest being we know of, an assumption which we have inherited from the Romans, whose humanitas was so alien to the Greeks’ frame of mind that they had not even a word for it. (The reason for the absence of the word humanitas from Greek language and thought was that the Greeks, in contrast to the Romans, never thought that man is the highest being there is. Aristotle calls this belief atopos, “absurd.”)[2] This view of man is even more alien to the scientist, to whom man is no more than a special case of organic life and to whom man’s habitat—the earth, together with earthbound laws—is no more than a special borderline case of absolute, universal laws, that is, laws that rule the immensity of the universe. Surely the scientist cannot permit himself to ask: What consequences will the result of my investigations have for the stature (or, for that matter, for the future) of man? It has been the glory of modern science that it has been able to emancipate itself completely from all such anthropocentric, that is, truly humanistic, concerns.

more (along with several response essays) from The New Atlantis here.

Though Henry Hathaway’s 1953 film Niagara put a rather hopeless spin on marriage, the film turned Niagara Falls honeymoon fever—one hundred years old in 1952—into an epidemic. It also vaulted Marilyn Monroe into her now-familiar position as an icon of ruthless American femininity.

Much of the interest in the film’s “Marilyn walk” focused on the question of whether it was real. A minicontroversy—the kind that perpetually swirled around Marilyn—arose over the seemingly trivial question of how her hip-swinging, eye-catching wriggle of a walk came to be. The controversy reflected what biographer Sarah Churchwell calls “the central anxiety in Marilyn’s story: Was she natural or manufactured? Scripted or real?”

In the ’50s, this was becoming a question for the Falls too.

more from The Believer here.

In the first decade of the 21st century modern art became a popular phenomenon. Galleries stopped being the preserve of an elite, and artists communicated directly with a mass public. Who could have guessed, in 1998, that within 10 years an artist as serious as Doris Salcedo would be a well-known name thanks to a crack she’d made in a south London power station?

The groundwork for arts popular triumph was laid in the 1990s, when art made news with one sensation after another. It was outrageous and disreputable. That now seems a remote attitude. Art is accepted these days – even occasionally understood.

This century started with an event whose significance is still growing: Britain’s first modern art museum opened. Unlike New York’s lofty Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern turned out to be a celebration of art now with mass appeal. Tate Modern is in itself the most important phenomenon in art now, anywhere in the world, because it has changed art’s audience, and destroyed the old order. The traditional preserves of the critic, the art historian, “the expert”, have vanished.

more from The Guardian here.

From Booklist:

For those readers anxious to get a head start planning Black History Month activities or ordering relevant titles, we are offering our ninth annual Black History preview. It is intended to provide an overview of some of the books by and about African Americans to be published in 2008. The titles are based on lists submitted to us by both adult and youth publishers. Because we have not seen many of these titles yet, we can’t offer recommendations at this point, but we will be considering them for review as galleys arrive in the office in the coming weeks. Think of this Preview as part 1 of our Black History Month coverage. Part 2, of course, will be our annual Black History issue in February, which will include both reviews and numerous feature articles.

Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War. By James Brewer Stewart.

More here.

From Nature:

Aside from the UN’s four top picks, 2008 is also the Year of the Frog. “Largely our campaign is targeted at the zoo community,” says Kevin Zippel, program director for Amphibian Ark, the international conservation organization behind this year. Because of this target audience, the perceived wider reach of the UN was unnecessary for their campaign. Amphibian Ark has highlighted 500 frog species threatened with extinction. The year of the frog campaign is aiming to raise $50 million to try to save them — a huge job. “We have pretty lofty goals,” says Zippel, adding that the year will be a success even if just one of those 500 species is saved.

Zippel thinks the wider populous isn’t so blinkered that it only sees UN-backed campaigns as credible. Celebrity helps raise profiles, he says, and The Year of the Frog has Sir David Attenborough as its patron. The campaign also has Kermit the Frog’s backing, he says.

More here.