From Harvard Magazine:

Flattened by a cold in 1998, Eric Lerner ’71, then a Hollywood screenwriter, picked up a biography of Allan Pinkerton, founder of the first detective agency in the United States. Three men were already working for Pinkerton in Chicago in 1856 when he hired Kate Warne as perhaps the first-ever female private eye. “The biographer dismissed rumors of a romantic relationship between Warne and Pinkerton,” says Lerner. “I literally dropped the book and laughed out loud—are you kidding me? She spends two years with him in Washington, D.C., while he is away from his family. He is at her bedside when she dies, and she is buried next to him. Rumors?”

Within two days, Lerner was proposing a movie about Pinkerton and Warne to a studio. “They bought it on a phone pitch,” he says. He got paid to write the screenplay, but, in one of Hollywood’s familiar patterns, “Before I finished the first draft, everyone was fired. It sat in a drawer for seven years before the rights reverted to me. By that time I didn’t want to write a screenplay ever again.” Screenplays, he reports, “are enormously confining: the story is there, but there is no voice in a movie. As a writer, I missed my own voice. I always loved the voice in a novel, the storyteller.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor had successfully wired the nerves of his forearm to a computer in New York City’s Columbia University and networked them to a robotic system back in his Reading, England, lab. “My body was effectively extended over the Internet,” Warwick says.

It’s a far cry from his vision of transforming humanity into a race of half-machine cyborgs able to commune with the digital world—there is no spoon, Neo—but such an evolution is necessary, says 54-year-old Warwick. Those who don’t avail themselves of subcutaneous microchips and other implanted technology, he predicts, will be at a serious disadvantage in tomorrow’s world, because they won’t be able to communicate with the “superintelligent machines” sure to be occupying the highest rungs of society, as he explains in a 2003 documentary, Building Gods, which is circulating online.

Something of a self-promoter, Warwick, or “Captain Cyborg” as a U.K. newspaper once dubbed him, has appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and other shows on the TV talk circuit to tout his work. In his 2004 book, I, Cyborg, he describes his research as “the extraordinary story of my adventure as the first human entering into a cyber world.”

More here.

///
Planting the Alder
Seamus Heaney

For the bark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped
And pigeon-collared.

For the splitter-splatter, guttering
Rain-flirt leaves.

For the sub and clot of the first green cones,
Smelted ermerald, chrlorophyll.

For the scut and scat of the cones in winter,
So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle.

For the alder-wood, flame-red when torn
Branch from branch

But mostly for the swinging locks
of yellow catkins,

Plant it, plant it,
Streel-head in the rain.

from District and Circle, published 2006

///

[Thanks to Craig Marsden.]

Jared Diamond in The New Yorker:

State government is now so nearly universal around the globe that we forget how recent an innovation it is; the first states are thought to have arisen only about fifty-five hundred years ago, in the Fertile Crescent. Before there were states, Daniel’s method of resolving major disputes—either violently or by payment of compensation—was the worldwide norm. Papua New Guinea is not the only place where those traditional methods of dispute resolution still coexist uneasily with the methods of state government. For example, Daniel’s methods might seem quite familiar to members of urban gangs in America, and also to Somalis, Afghans, Kenyans, and peoples of other countries where tribal ties remain strong and state control weak. As I eventually came to realize, Daniel’s thirst for vengeance and his hostility to rival clans are really not so far from our own habits of mind as we might like to think.

More here.

Here, in Italy, I have developed the habit of cooking dinner almost every day (I usually eat the leftovers for lunch the next day). I wake up much earlier in the morning than I used to in New York, and am too tired to do much by about 6 in the evening. At that point, I find it relaxing to cook (I used to watch TV in New York, but don’t have one here, only religiously watching Stewart and Colbert iTunes downloads on my computer). I make it a point not to rush around the kitchen, instead taking my time to chop and peel things, talking to my wife or whoever else is around, finding stuff to post on 3QD while the onions are browning, etc. (One thing I really hate is when cooks try to show their expertise by chopping, say, an onion with an incredibly recklessly fast rat-a-tat-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta motion on the cutting board–as if the 19 seconds they just saved by endangering their fingers really makes any dent in the total time needed to cook the meal! It’s just a silly form of showing off, best suited to suburban Hibachi restaurants where the cooking at one’s table is more of a circus-act than a kind of craftsmanship, and where the children have been brought more for the entertainment than the food. All cutting, peeling, chopping, mincing, grating, etc. should be done calmly and slowly, and with the right knife–thanks, once again, for the Global, Asad–it is a meditative and enjoyable exercise.) It takes me anywhere from 90 to 150 minutes to prepare a multi-course meal, and so I completely agree with Ms. Shapiro here. It is simply not possible to cook well in 30 minutes (and certainly would not be enjoyable; adding to, rather than subtracting from, the day’s stress). Many things I make have cooking times longer than that, and prep and cleanup (which I do while I am cooking, so that after the meal only the plates we ate in need washing) take long too. It’s nice to have freshly cooked food every day. Try it.

Anyhow, here’s Laura Shapiro in Slate:

Fantasy has always played a big part in beat-the-clock cookbooks; in fact, the category relies on it, as Ramsay’s book makes clear. Despite the shopping lists, the step-by-step directions, the time-saving tips, and the authors who insist that this is exactly how they cook at home, there’s little that reflects the real world in such books. Like those gigantic, glossy tomes with titles like My Kitchen in the Wine Country or Tuscany at Table, the quick-cook books are wish books. They’re cheaper, friendlier, and far more portable than their $75 siblings, but they’re wish books all the same. Open a quick-cook book and you’re transported—not to some Provencal dreamscape but to your own kitchen. Why, that’s you at the counter, cheerfully putting together a charming meal for the family while your children set the table. You can practically see them storing up those all-important food memories that will accompany them through life like a St. Christopher medal.

If you’re an ordinary, sometimes bumbling home cook, it’s hard to resist a book that promises to impose factorylike precision on a chore that is by nature messy and unpredictable. Hence the popularity of stopwatch cuisine, which used to be known as “practical” or “simple” cookery and is now designated by sheer speed: The 60-Minute Gourmet, 30-Minute Meals, 29-Minute Meals, 20-Minute Menus, Fresh 15-Minute Meals, 10-Minute Cuisine, Rocco’s 5-Minute Flavor, The Last-Minute Cookbook. How do they do it?

More here.

The movie that I’ve been anticipating all year–Harold and Kumar Escape from Guntanamo Bay…yes, really, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guntanamo Bay–opens Friday.  In the National Post:

More recently, comic casting has been colour blind — think of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones battling illegal aliens of the extraterrestrial kind in Men in Black and its sequel. But the first Harold & Kumar movie in 2004 went a step further, taking second-tier movie minorities, usually cast for their martial arts prowess and bad-guy cred, and making them the stars. Screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg even gave them the Everyman monikers Lee and Patel, more common than the surnames of Men in Black’s lead actors. (The Toronto white pages alone lists some 6,000 Lees and Patels.)

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle featured racial comedy, but never at the expense of its stars. The most blatant example is the bookish guy in the county lockup, arrested and roughed up for being black. Kumar (Kal Penn) gets to shout one pitch-perfect convenience-store “thank you come again!” and Harold (John Cho) frets about being invited to his Chinese friend’s all-Chinese get-togethers, but that’s about it.

In the sequel that opens Friday, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, the budget is bigger, the expectations greater and the stakes higher. As such, Hurwitz and Schlossberg have felt the need to widen their racial net. Again, however, Lee and Patel escape the brunt of the profiling, except for the unfortunate opening that finds them accused of being operatives of Al Qaeda and North Korea in cahoots.

[H/t: Linta Varghese]

Adrian Hon in Mssv:

I love all the stories in We Tell Stories, but I do have favourites. Back when we were planning the six week schedule for the stories, we decided to structure it like an album – start with a bang, and end with a bang.

The first story was The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming. It was the most visually striking of all six stories, using the Google Maps engine, and we knew that it would generate quite a bit of buzz among the tech crowd, so it seemed like a natural choice to open with. It certainly paid off – The 21 Steps has now been read over 150,000 times, which is more than all of Charles Cumming’s book sales put together. I believe he told BBC Radio Scotland that he was now better known for The 21 Steps than his books, which I don’t think is an overstatement.

I had the idea to create a story in Google Maps some time ago, long before we got in touch with Penguin, and I feel that it’s a rather obvious idea. I’m happy that we made it, of course, but I don’t think it’s the most mind-blowingly original thing that I’ve come up with. We excelled more in implementation and interface design rather than in ’story architecture’*. When it comes to originality though, I am most proud of the design we made for the final story, Mohsin Hamid’s The (Former) General In His Labyrinth.

More here.  [Photo shows Mohsin Hamid.]

It takes Doris Lessing just four minutes to come out with something, if not actually controversial, then at least unexpected. It’s about Hitler. She says she understands him. This from a former member of the Communist Party. (She left in 1956, the year of Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Congress, the one in which he denounced Stalin.) We are talking, I should explain, about Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet on the Western Front. She recently read another of his books, about three German soldiers who, like Hitler, return from the Great War to the economic chaos of the Weimar Republic. ‘They see people carting millions of marks around in wheelbarrows and, being old comrades, they stand by each other. And as you read that you suddenly understand Hitler.’

She’s not condoning Hitler, of course, merely explaining his early popularit y. I mention her comment to show her endearingly cavalier way with language. She doesn’t care what people might think. She is past caring.

more from The Telegraph here.

Two new collections of poems, by Adam Zagajewski and David Yezzi, offer different demonstrations of that rare virtue. Mr. Zagajewski, who was born in Poland in 1945, is one of the few foreign-language poets to be regularly translated into English. He is often mentioned in the same breath as Czeslaw Milosz, in part simply because he is the most famous Polish poet of the generation after Milosz’s. Mr. Zagajewski is writing Milosz’s biography, and it would be surprising if he didn’t eventually follow his subject to Stockholm. But there is also a deeper similarity, since the two poets, products of the same Polish experience, share a basic theme: the dilemma of the spirit trapped in history, of freedom constrained by necessity.

These are two ways of naming the opponents invoked in the title of “Eternal Enemies” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 116 pages, $24), Mr. Zagajewski’s fifth collection of poems to appear in English (translated by Clare Cavanagh). For Milosz, who survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw and defected from Poland’s Communist regime, spirit and history were mortal foes, locked in a permanent death grip. For Mr. Zagajewski, who belongs to the generation of Solidarity and of the Velvet Revolutions, their enmity is less acute, more a chronic condition to be lived with. In his poems, the ordinary world is always quivering at the brink of, but never quite yielding to, ecstasy.

more from the NY Sun here.

Gary Wolf in Wired:

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge — introspection, intuition, and conscious thought — but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

Christine Kenneally in the New York Times:

Faced with pictures of odd clay creatures sporting prominent heads and pointy limbs, students at Carnegie Mellon were asked to identify which “aliens” were friendly and which were not.

The students were not told that the aliens fell naturally into two groups, although the differences were subtle and not easy to describe.

Some had somewhat lumpy, misshapen heads. Others had smoother domes. After students assigned each alien to a category, they were told whether they had guessed right or wrong, learning as they went that smooth heads were friendly and lumpy heads were not.

The experimenter, Dr. Gary Lupyan, who is now doing postdoctoral research at Cornell, added a little item of information to one test group. He told the group that previous subjects had found it helpful to label the aliens, calling the friendly ones “leebish” and the unfriendly ones “grecious,” or vice versa.

When the participants found out whether their choice was right or wrong, they were also shown the appropriate label. All the participants eventually learned the difference between the aliens, but the group using labels learned much faster. Naming, Dr. Lupyan concluded, helps to create mental categories.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Israeli researchers announced this week that they have developed a new technique that may wipe out stubborn bacteria that elude antibiotics. Some infections such as tuberculosis (TB) can lay dormant in the lungs for decades before reactivating and causing symptoms— even after most of the disease-causing bacteria have been leveled by antibiotics.

But scientists at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that they discovered a way to eradicate the stubborn bugs and prevent them from suddenly striking again when an individual’s immune system is off guard. The new method capitalizes on the dormant bacteria’s need for nutrients such as iron and magnesium. Such cells can avoid antibiotics when they’re starved and become inactive. But the researchers were able to reduce populations of persistent bacteria by up to 99 percent by first perking them up with nutrients and then blasting them with an antibiotic.

More here.

From Nature:

The sex of new babies is influenced by the mother’s diet before she conceives, a new study suggests. According to a survey of 740 British mums to be, a high-calorie diet is more likely to lead to a baby boy in nine months’ time. Researchers led by Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter collected data on the pre-conception dietary habits of pregnant women, and found that 56% of women in the highest one-third of calorie intake had male fetuses. In the lowest third, only 45% bore boys.

The women, who were attending maternity clinics, were asked to compile a ‘retrospective diary’ of their food intake in the weeks before they fell pregnant. Mathews and her colleagues then analysed the results to look for a relationship between food intake and the sex of their offspring. The level of calorie intake was the main dietary factor that affected offspring sex, say the researchers, who report their research in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Overall, women in Matthews’s study who produced sons ate an average of 180 calories more per day than those who had daughters — “the equivalent of eating a banana”, she says.

More here.

///
Ode to History
Mary Jo Bang

Had she not lain on that bed with a boy
All those years ago, where would they be, she wondered.
She and the child that wouldn’t have been but was now
No more. She would know nothing
Of mothering. She would know nothing
Of death. She would know nothing
Of love. The three things she’d been given
To remember. Wake me up, please, she said,
When this life is over. Look at her—It’s as if
The windows of night have been sewn to her eyes.

///

Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present Alison Bowen, in the New York Daily News, on my sister:

Dr. Azra Raza speaks with the fierceness of someone whose existence revolves around life-saving matters.

For more than 30 years, she’s treated leukemia patients and researched how to treat pre-leukemia cells before they develop into cancer.

“Constantly I’m pushing the envelope,” says Raza, 55, the director of the Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) Center at St. Vincent’s Comprehensive Cancer Center. “That, no. We are not going to become complacent.”

Most wrenching among the many heartbreaks she’s seen was the death of her husband of 17 years, Dr. Harvey Preisler, the director of the Rush Cancer Institute in Chicago, who died in 2002 of leukemia.

“To that day, even as he could see that the end was clearly approaching him, he wanted other patients to suffer less,” says Raza.

The MDS Center near Union Square, which Raza has headed since moving to the city from Massachusetts in October, is one of a few that does both MDS research – the study of abnormal cells that can trigger leukemia – and treats patients.

A hallmark of the program is a bank containing more than 40,000 tissue samples of MDS collected over two decades by Raza – and brought here last year in a U-Haul truck.

More here.

Something about the South African dock workers refusal to unload arms headed to Zimbabwe reminds me of the internationalism of the old labor movement, especially the image of COSATU going up against Mbeki’s tacit support for Mugabe on behalf of the Zimbabwean population.  Here is an online petition by the International Action Network on Small Arms, for those interested, calling on the international community to stop the arms shipments.  I think one targeted at the South African government may be more poignant. From All Africa:

The London-based International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) said yesterday they were mobilising unions in China and Africa, including those in Angola, to take a firm stand and to stop the ship from offloading its cargo of weapons. The ITF, which consists of more than 650 unions, representing 4,5-million workers in 148 countries, is believed to have been instrumental in Mozambique’s refusal allow the ship to dock in Maputo after ITF affiliate the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) asked it to intervene.

An ITF spokesman in Durban, Sprite Zungu, indicated yesterday he was expecting information about the final destination of the ship by tomorrow and would fly to that country to speak to the authorities there.

Cosatu spokesman Patrick Craven said yesterday Cosatu had been in contact with all its affiliates and was “doing everything possible to alert the international trade union movement to the danger to the workers of Zimbabwe if the cargo is allowed to be unloaded and delivered to Mugabe’s forces”.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

INTERVIEWER What was your next obsession, after detective stories?

ISHIGURO
Rock music. After Sherlock Holmes, I stopped reading until my early twenties. But I’d played the piano since I was five. I started playing the guitar when I was fifteen, and I started listening to pop records—pretty awful pop records—when I was about eleven. I thought they were wonderful. The first record that I really liked was Tom Jones singing “The Green, Green Grass of Home.” Tom Jones is a Welshman, but “The Green, Green Grass of Home” is a cowboy song. He was singing songs about the cowboy world I knew from TV.
I had a miniature Sony reel-to-reel that my father brought me from Japan, and I would tape directly from the speaker of the radio, an early form of downloading music. I would try to work out the words from this very bad recording with buzzes. Then when I was thirteen, I bought John Wesley Harding, which was my first Dylan album, right when it came out.

more from The Paris Review here.