//
Flying East for my Grandson’s Birth
Penelope Schott

And I’m sailing in high silver over Pendleton and Bozeman
as you journey the last hard inches toward the sill of the pubis.
Talking centimeters.

At 33,000 feet, the outside temperature, according to the screen
and these frost flowers blooming here on the window by my seat,
is minus 59 degrees Fahrenheit.

Council Bluffs and the rectangular plains marking buffalo bones
in late snow. Now the thick Mississippi twists like an umbilical,
and the cord, coiled through generations, tightens my groin.

Push, they told me, and what else could I do, my back cracking
over the rim of the world?

At the darkening edge of the continent,
she is breathing and sweating. Let somebody’s cool hand
sweep damp hair from her forehead.

As I pass over Cincinnati, she is opening in waves and scarlet
birth blood is flowing through us all. East now of Pittsburgh
she is riding her moment of I can’t do this any more, the body
almost inverting itself, and clouds rushing under my wings,
until the lift and gasp in the moving air.

Sometimes we call this
landing.
  Child, I will tell you every glorious thing I know:
We are made out of dirt and water. Someday your hands
will have freckles and lines. Many cherished people
have lived and died before you.

Oh, and, child, one thing more:
this earth invents us and consorts with us willingly
only because we tell stories.

//

From Scientific American:

Web 2.0 technologies open up a much richer dialogue, says Bill Hooker, a postdoctoral cancer researcher at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Portland, Ore., and author of a three-part survey on open-science efforts that appeared at 3 Quarks Daily (www.3quarksdaily.com), where a group of bloggers write about science and culture. “To me, opening up my lab notebook means giving people a window into what I’m doing every day,” Hooker says. “That’s an immense leap forward in clarity. In a paper, I can see what you’ve done. But I don’t know how many things you tried that didn’t work. It’s those little details that become clear with an open [online] notebook but are obscured by every other communication mechanism we have. It makes science more efficient.” That jump in efficiency, in turn, could greatly benefit society, in everything from faster drug development to greater national competitiveness.

Of course, many scientists remain wary of such openness—especially in the hypercompetitive biomedical fields, where patents, promotion and tenure can hinge on being the first to publish a new discovery. For these practitioners, Science 2.0 seems dangerous: putting your serious work out on blogs and social networks feels like an open invitation to have your lab notebooks vandalized—or, worse, your best ideas stolen and published by a rival.

More here.

From Nature:

Researchers have found evidence that two common viruses may be lurking behind some cases of lung cancer: human papilloma virus (HPV), already recognized as a cause of cervical cancer, and the measles virus. The results, which will be presented today at the European Lung Cancer Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, are preliminary: while viruses have been found associated with lung tumours, there is no direct evidence that the viruses are actually causing the cancer. But the notion that a virus could contribute to some cases of the disease is a plausible one, says Denise Galloway, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, who was not affiliated with the new studies.

As much as 20% of the world’s cancers have been linked to infections. In addition to the connection between HPVs and cervical cancer, chronic infections by hepatitis-B and -C viruses contribute to liver cancer, and the bacterium Helicobacter pylori has been associated with stomach cancer. In February, researchers reported viral genome sequences found in an aggressive form of skin cancer called Merkel cell carcinoma, although it remains to be seen precisely how the virus contributes to skin cancer, if at all. And some have proposed that a virus similar to the ‘mouse mammary tumor virus’ — which causes breast cancer in mice — could also be associated with breast cancer in humans.

More here.

Dana Stevens in Slate:

Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris’ brainy, meandering inquiry into the origin of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs that shocked the country when they were first published in 2004, is indisputably an impressive piece of documentary filmmaking. Whether that makes it a great document about what actually happened at Abu Ghraib is a separate question, and one that goes to the heart of Morris’ project as a filmmaker.

Ever since The Thin Blue Line (1988), a real-life whodunit that made such a powerful case for the innocence of its subject that he was eventually cleared of murder charges and released from prison, Morris has been making films that seek not to expose the truth but to show how elusive it can be. The very title of his previous film, the Vietnam documentary The Fog of War (2004), emphasized obscurity over clarity. Morris is obsessed with the impossibility of truthful storytelling, the way individual testimony is always strained through the filters of memory, perspective, and the speaker’s need to present him- or herself in the best light possible. As abstract and intellectually distancing as this approach may sound, it’s strangely well-suited to documenting the abuses at Abu Ghraib, which took place in a moral gray zone tacitly sanctioned by the administration’s ongoing refusal to define exactly what torture or stress position or enemy combatant means.

More here.

John Cartwright in Physics World:

Europeans are often a little too eager to take credit for innovation. Copernicus may have formalized the heliocentric model of the solar system in the early 1500s, for example, but the Pole only did so with the help of vast tables of astronomical measurements taken 200 years earlier in Iran. Even the scientific method itself, often thought to have emerged from Galileo’s experiments in Italy around the same time, has its roots with Arab scientists of the 11th century.

Similar lapses of history occur in the art world. Many still think of oil painting as a European invention of the early Renaissance, perfected by the 15th century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, who supposedly stumbled across the medium while experimenting with glazes. But they too are mistaken.

“A whole mythology sprang up around van Eyck’s so-called invention of oil painting,” explains Jenny Graham, an art historian from the University of Plymouth, UK, and author of the recent book Inventing Van Eyck. “But it has long been recognised that oil painting was documented in the 12th century or even earlier and may have originated outside Europe.”

Art historians have always lacked real examples to bear out this documentary evidence. Now, however, scientists performing experiments at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) on samples of murals taken from Afghanistan say they have uncovered what could be the earliest known examples of oil paintings.

More here.  [Thanks to Manas Shaikh.]

Ruchira Paul at Accidental Blogger:

The very title of Hedina Tahirovic Sijercic’s Dukh/Pain draws me as an Indian to this book of poems.  The bi-lingual title does not merely suggest a linguistic proximity to Indian languages but much more. Philosophically, the word “dukh” echoes the cultural import of the Buddhist/ Pali word “dukkha.” The word “pain” gets loaded with greater meaning and intensity, linked side by side with “dukh”.

The simplicity of Hedina’s poems is indeed deceptive. These poems reflect the dukh of a long history of discrimination, persecution and prejudice against the “wandering” Roma. But even while they have been on the move, they have carried within themselves their beliefs, myths, way of life and even superstitions. While Hedina’s poems celebrate harmony with the non-Roma people in a dream, they also play with the metaphor of “fleeing” from the nightmare of being bitten by “Big-headed, winged, red insects” (“I Flee”). The continuous persecution of the Roma is recorded in the history of their expulsions, through the “Caravan Law” of Hamburg, their exclusion from social life, denial of social welfare and a whole series of humiliations suffered in  Europe and elsewhere.

More here.

Bruno Maddox on why it might, as far as he can tell, in DIscover:

For one thing, as far as I can tell, nobody knows how a magnet can move a piece of metal without touching it. And for another—more astonishing still, perhaps—nobody seems to care.

This information was not easy to come by. My copy of Electronics for Dummies now shares a shelf with Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics by Frederick Byron Jr. and Robert Fuller. Should a doctor at any point take a cross section of my brain, she will find patches of scarring and dead tissue, souvenirs of the time I pursued the mystery of magnetism across the 11-dimensional badlands of string theory. Students of human pathos may one day cherish the 16-minute recording of me, with my 100 percent positive-feedback rating as an eBay purchaser, failing to make renowned physicist Steven Weinberg, who won a Nobel for unifying electromagnetism with the so-called weak force, admit that he can’t explain how a magnet holds a dry-cleaning ticket to the door of a refrigerator.

But as far as I can tell—and isn’t the point of science that all its bigger propositions come accompanied by this noble caveat?—he really can’t.

Over at Studio 360, a radio discussion of Harold and Kumar that includes my sister Linta Varghese.

They say “tragedy plus time equals comedy,” and another film opening this weekend takes unjustly imprisoned terror suspects as its focus. This one is a comedy about two bong-loving stoners: “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.” Arun Rath explains why Harold and Kumar have become underground heroes for respectable Asian-Americans.

Nathalie Rothschild in Sp!ked:

Laura María Agustín’s provocative new book, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, really does what it says on the back cover: ‘[It] explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims, and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest.’

Agustín warns that ‘what we say about any given subject is always constructed, and there are only partial truths’. But you can disregard the book’s many postmodern caveats: this is an honest, complex and certainly convincing read. Agustín knows what she’s talking about – she has researched and worked with people who sell sex for over 10 years, including in Latin America and the Caribbean.

It is precisely the fact that Agustín has complicated the ‘discourse’ around trafficking, migration and sex work that seems to get the backs up of those who volunteer and are employed in what she terms the ‘rescue industry’.

‘I’m considered the devil by people in the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women’ (an international NGO), she tells me. ‘They have actually called me a pimp and have said that I associate with traffickers and that I’m in the pay of the sex industry, and any number of vile things.’

I would like to add a footnote to Saba Mahmood’s excellent piece “Is Critique Secular?” I think it’s important to explain the power that an affirmative answer to this question carries in our contemporary academy.

What are we to think of the idea, entertained by Rawls for a time, that one can legitimately ask of a religiously and philosophically diverse democracy that everyone deliberate in a language of reason alone, leaving their religious views in the vestibule of the public sphere? The tyrannical nature of this demand was rapidly appreciated by Rawls, to his credit. But we ought to ask why the proposition arose in the first place. Rawls’ point in suggesting this restriction was that everyone should use a language with which they could reasonably expect their fellow citizens to agree. The idea seems to be something like this. Secular reason is a language that everyone speaks, and can argue and be convinced in. Religious languages operate outside of this discourse, by introducing extraneous premises which only believers can accept. So let’s all talk the common language.

more from The Immanent Frame here.

Dan Colen and Nate Lowman’s collaboration at Maccarone has the look of now. Which is to say their show is a self-conscious pastiche of Warhol, Cady Noland’s junked-up approach, Richard Prince, quasi-slacker neo-punk, scuzz, stock ideas about mass culture, appropriation, assemblage, and a sort of car-wreck aesthetic. It’s a new hip academy.

That’s a good thing and a bad thing. Colen, who in January 2007 appeared on the cover of this magazine, in bed in his underpants with two other male artists, is known for his superrealist renderings of bird droppings (there’s a great one at Deitch Projects right now) and graffiti. Lowman is noted for his impressive handmade paintings of bullet holes and advertising. Along with Dash Snow and Terence Koh, they’re hotshots on the scene. Each on his own is good at this mannered nonstyle. But their show, while roguish, is merely occupying a well-defined position. A heat-seeking art world, mindlessly drawn to the familiar, has deemed that current art should look this way, so more art does. That’s part of the bad thing.

more from New York Magazine here.

History—the rational and methodical study of the human past—was invented by a single man just under twenty-five hundred years ago; just under twenty-five years ago, when I was starting a graduate degree in Classics, some of us could be pretty condescending about the man who invented it and (we’d joke) his penchant for flowered Hawaiian shirts.

The risible figure in question was Herodotus, known since Roman times as “the Father of History.” The sobriquet, conferred by Cicero, was intended as a compliment. Herodotus’ Histories—a chatty, dizzily digressive nine-volume account of the Persian Wars of 490 to 479 B.C., in which a wobbly coalition of squabbling Greek city-states twice repulsed the greatest expeditionary force the world had ever seen—represented the first extended prose narrative about a major historical event. (Or, indeed, about virtually anything.) And yet to us graduate students in the mid-nineteen-eighties the word “father” seemed to reflect something hopelessly parental and passé about Herodotus, and about the sepia-toned “good war” that was his subject. These were, after all, the last years of the Cold War, and the terse, skeptical manner of another Greek historian—Thucydides, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War, between Athens and Sparta, two generations later—seemed far more congenial. To be an admirer of Thucydides’ History, with its deep cynicism about political, rhetorical, and ideological hypocrisy, with its all too recognizable protagonists—a liberal yet imperialistic democracy and an authoritarian oligarchy, engaged in a war of attrition fought by proxy at the remote fringes of empire—was to advertise yourself as a hardheaded connoisseur of global Realpolitik.

more from The New Yorker here.

From MSNBC:

It’s been 55 years since the landmark paper on DNA’s double helix was published, and five years since scientists revealed the complete genetic code for humans. To mark the anniversary, Friday has been set aside as National DNA Day – and it’s a good time to reflect upon how genetics has transformed society. Since 2003, genetic analysis has opened a new medical frontier. Now a new social frontier awaits as well: Several ventures have set up social networks based on genetic profiles. But there’s also a potential dark side to the DNA revolution.

Socializing with DNA
The social trend is rooted in the search for family roots: For years, companies have been offering tests that analyze your DNA for genetic markers that are passed down from father to son, or from mother to children. But once your sample is analyzed, then what? The companies set up online forums that let the people who took the tests compare their results. That’s how I began determining lines of genetic relationships for my own family almost seven years ago – and how I was able to help match up Boyle relatives who didn’t know they were related until they took the test.

More here.

From The New York Times:

IN 1860, while studying primroses in the garden of Down House, his home in Kent, England, Charles Darwin noticed something odd about their blooms.

While all the flowers had both male and female parts — anthers and pistils — in some the anthers were prominent and in others the pistils were longer. So he experimented in his home laboratory and greenhouses, cross-pollinating some plants with their anatomical opposites. The results were striking. “He determined that if they cross-pollinate, they produce more seed and more vigorous seedlings,” said Margaret Falk, a horticulturalist and associate vice president at the New York Botanical Garden. The variation is evolution’s way of increasing cross-pollination, she said.

Now the Botanical Garden is replicating this work, and more of Darwin’s Down House experiments, in a stunning, multipart exhibition called “Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure.”

More here.

///
-another excerpt from
Under Milk Wood
Dylan Thomas

Oh there’s a face!
Where you get that hair from?
Got it from and old tom cat.
Give it back then, Love.
Oh, there’s a perm!

Where you get that nose from, Lily?
Got it from my father, silly.
You’ve got it on upside down!
Oh, there’s a conk!

Look at your complexion!
Oh no, you look.
Needs a bit of makeup.
Needs a veil.
Oh, there’s glamour!

Where you get that smile, Lil?
Never you mind, girl.
Nobody loves you.
That’s what you think.

Who is it loves you?
Shan’t tell.
Come on Lily.
Cross your heart, then?
Cross my heart.

And very softly, her lips almost touching her reflection,
she breathes the name and clouds the shaving glass.

///

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In response to the crimes committed during World War II, the Declaration sought to establish the principle that everyone is entitled to the same basic rights, irrespective of race, color, sex, language, religion, or other status. So, perhaps we can judge moral progress by asking how well we have done in combating racism and sexism.

Assessing the extent to which racism and sexism have actually been reduced is a daunting task. Nevertheless, recent polls by WorldPublicOpinion.org shed some indirect light on this question.

The polls, involving nearly 15,000 respondents, were conducted in 16 countries, representing 58% of the world’s population: Azerbaijan, China, Egypt, France, Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, the Palestinian Territories, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States. In 11 of these countries, most people believe that, over their lifetimes, people of different races and ethnicities have come to be treated more equally.

Thomas Meaney in the WSJ:

Detlev Claussen’s “Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius” (readably translated from the German by Rodney Livingstone) should be read more as a companion to Adorno’s notoriously difficult writings than as a biography pure and simple. A former student of Adorno’s, Mr. Claussen is on intimate terms with the late master’s work, especially his correspondence with compatriots such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. But if Mr. Claussen excels at giving us a sense of the intellectual hotbed in which Adorno formed his ideas, he is too loyal an acolyte to engage the ideas themselves.

A better subtitle for his book might have been “One Last Marxist.” While Adorno was far from a salon-Bolshevik (he repeatedly scorned Brecht for his Soviet ties), he belonged to the last generation of German thinkers who tried to salvage Marx’s critique of capitalism. Instead of training their sights on the economic base, these Marxists — later known as the Frankfurt School — preferred to concentrate on the cultural realm.

Marxism denounced capitalism for producing poverty, but Adorno and company thought it created and satisfied too many needs, causing us to value nearly everything for its market price and not for itself. Repelled by the vulgarity of the bourgeoisie but unwilling to trust the taste of the proletariat, they hoped for a socialist solution that would somehow preserve a genuinely autonomous culture.

Arthur C. Clarke, who died last month, said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If we could land a jumbo jet beside a medieval village, would we not be worshiped as gods? The technology of interstellar travel, and the scientific knowledge on which it would be based, are as far beyond us as our present-day knowledge surpasses that of Dark Age peasants. Parting the Red Sea — or splitting the moon in two as Muhammad is alleged to have done — would be child’s play to those who command forces powerful enough to propel them from star to star.

But now the question arises: In what sense would the god-like aliens not be gods? Answer: In a very important sense. To deserve the name of God, a being would have to have designed more than just a jumbo jet or even a starship. He would have to have designed the universe. And therein lies a fundamental contradiction. Entities capable of designing anything, whether they be human engineers or interstellar aliens, must be complex — and therefore, statistically improbable. And statistically improbable things don’t just happen spontaneously by chance without an explanation trail. That is what “improbable” means, as creationists never tire of assuring us (they wrongly think Darwinian natural selection is a matter of chance).

more from the LA Times here.

In the summer of 1984, having co-edited the complete works of Shakespeare before reaching the age of thirty, Gary Taylor sat in the Bodleian Library, read all of Middleton and had an epiphany:

“Sometimes quietly moved to tears, sometimes unable to contain my laughter . . . I thought, again and again, why was I never told to read this? . . . Why have I never seen this performed? . . . why have I never been introduced to this Dickensian, Dostoevskian riot of life? Vindice, DeFlores, and Beatrice Joanna I’d encountered in college, but what about Allwit and all the rest? Lucifer, Candido, Quomodo, Sir Bounteous Progress, Dampit, Pieboard, Tailby, Weatherwise, Pompey Doodle, Captain Ager, Plumporridge, Simplicity, Simon, George, Lepet, the Yorkshire Husband, the Black Knight and Fat Bishop and White Queen’s Pawn, the Tyrant, the Lady, the Young Queen, the Duchess of Milan, Mistress Low-water, Mill, Valeria, Hecate and Madge Owl, Livia and Bianca and Isabella – where have you people been all my life?”

He vowed to right the wrong of the centuries’ neglect, to give Middleton the Collected Works he deserved, serving him as John Heminge and Henry Condell had served Shakespeare in the First Folio.

more from the TLS here.