”’

“Wait a minute. What did you just say? You’re predicting $4-a-gallon gas?
… That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.”
–the President of the United States, Washington, D.C., Feb. 28, 2008

…

After Su Tung P’o
Heather McHugh

On The Birth of a Son

When a child is born, the parents say

they hope it’s healthy and intelligent. But as for me—

..

well, vigor and intelligence have wrecked my life. I pray

this baby we are seeing walloped, wiped and winningly anointed,

..

turns out dumb as oakum—and more sinister.

That way he can crown a tranquil life by being appointed

a cabinet minister.

…

From The London Times:

The toupee is gone. So, too, are four wives and most of his nine lives, along with the screen legends who conspired with Tony Curtis to make perhaps the most brilliant comedy film ever. At 82, the only surviving star of Some Like It Hot is still defiantly rattling his wheelchair and spilling salacious details about Hollywood’s golden era. Curtis, in London last week to launch an exhibition of his oil paintings at Harrods, the department store, talked about his fight with drugs and his passionate affair with Marilyn Monroe years before they were cast in the Billy Wilder comedy that would make them both cinema immortals.

The picture that emerges is of a man tormented throughout his career – by taunts about his pretty-boy looks, by Hollywood’s reluctance to recognise his achievements, by his failed relationships, fading allure and the years lost to cocaine. From the outset he felt he was destined for greatness – “From the way people looked at me, I knew it” – but a US Navy veterans’ website reveals that it could have been an altogether different destiny for the man born Bernard Schwartz.

In 1943 Signalman 3rd class Schwartz, the son of poor Hungarian Jewish immigrants, began the happiest period of his life serving aboard the USS Proteus. He was fascinated by submarines, thanks in part to watching Cary Grant peer through a periscope in Destination Tokyo. As a youngster he built boats out of broom handles, powered by tin propellers and elastic bands, which he launched on a park pond in east Manhattan.

More here.

Tim Adams in The Guardian:

The overriding argument of The Enchantress of Florence is partly that Western civilisation, to borrow from Gandhi, would be a good idea. Superstition and despotism are not the preserve of the mystical East here, nor are enlightenment and humanism inventions of the classical West. Each civilisation has its fair share of beauty and folly, cruelty and benevolence. ‘This may be the curse of the human race,’ the traveller suggests at one point, ‘not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.’

In setting this out, Rushdie the jackdaw is much in evidence too: he borrows and moulds all sorts of familiar tales into this one; the Arabian nights have long since been fair game, but he also steals gleefully from Orlando Furioso and from Machiavelli. The novel offers something of a paper trail of such references in a long bibliography, mostly of scholarly histories: ‘A few liberties have been taken with the historical record in the interests of truth,’ Rushdie notes, in a wry statement of intent.

Namechecked in these notes is the writer that Rushdie has most often claimed as a touchstone, Italo Calvino. In his recent collection of essays, Step Across This Line, Rushdie noted that he wanted his later writing to aspire to Calvino’s stated virtues of ‘lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity’. He suggested that he was searching for something like the Italian’s tone of voice, which ‘used the language of fable while eschewing the easy moral purpose of, for example, Aesop’. Calvino might be mentioned in the compendious endnotes, but oddly not for the book this one most resembles, Invisible Cities, which played out exactly Rushdie’s storytelling scenario, though between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

More here.

Andrew Newberg in The Global Spiral:

For years, Eugene [D’Aquili] and I have been studying the relationship between religious experience and brain function, and we hope that by monitoring Robert’s brain activity at the most intense and mystical moments of his meditation, we might shed some light on the mysterious connection between human consciousness and the persistent and peculiarly human longing to connect with something larger than ourselves…..

As my first installment on Metanexus regarding our recent book entitled, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, there are several primary points that require mention. Why God Won’t Go Away is the culmination of almost 25 years of research into the relationship between the brain and religious experience. It strikes at the heart of questions such as: What makes something spiritual? Why are religious experiences so powerful? and What can religious and mystical experiences tell us about the mind and even about reality? Dr. Eugene d’Aquili initiated this groundbreaking research almost 25 years ago with an analysis of religious experience in ancient cultures. As human beings and human culture developed, so did religions and associated religious experiences. Today, there is a tremendous amount of information about the myriad varieties of religious experience. We also have a much greater understanding about how the brain and mind work. Why God Won’t Go Away utilizes this knowledge to forge an integrated approach to understanding religious and mystical experiences. It describes this research in terms that are understandable to the scientist and non-scientist. The overall goal of this book is to help to facilitate a dialogue regarding this nexus of science and spirituality and to allow everyone to feel comfortable addressing these issues regardless of their perspective. We also realize that science is limited in what it can tell us about these experiences. Thus, we will explore not only how science can inform us about religious experience, but can also examine the implications that such experiences have with regard to science.

My favorite Willie Nelson story is of the young harmonica player who wanted to be in Nelson’s band so much that he’d drive to shows just for the chance to sit in on stage.

Nelson liked the guy’s soulful sound and figured the leader of their struggling group had hired the harmonica player. After a few nights, he asked what the harp player was being paid. When the bandleader said, “Nothing,” Nelson declared, “Double his salary!”

The musician was Mickey Raphael, who’s been at Nelson’s side for nearly 35 years, as much a fixture in their live show as the Texas flag that unfurls each night — and the story tells a lot about the good-natured, carefree approach that has helped make the singer-songwriter a widely beloved figure. He turns 75 on April 29.

more from the LA Times here.

The best new airports in the world right now are in Beijing, where Norman Foster’s Terminal 3 has just opened, and on the outskirts of Madrid, where Terminal 4 at Barajas, designed by Richard Rogers Partnership, has been in operation since 2006. Foster has achieved what no other architect has been able to: he has rethought the airport from scratch and made it work. Foster has done for airports what the architects Reed & Stem did for train stations with their design for Grand Central, a building whose greatest achievement is not its sumptuous main concourse but its orchestration of an intricate web of people, trains, taxis, and passing automobiles into a system that feels straightforward and logical, as if the building itself were guiding you from the entrance to your train. Foster, likewise, has established a pattern so clear that your natural instinct to walk straight ahead from the front door takes you where you need to go. The sheer legibility of the place would be achievement enough, given its size. Foster’s office claims it is the largest building in the world: it has a hundred and twenty-six aircraft stands, and it had to include separate sections, with their own security stations and travel-document-control areas, for domestic and international travel; a train station for a new rapid-transit line to downtown Beijing; an array of luxury shops; and even a Burger King. Even more remarkable than this organizational feat, however, is the fact that Terminal 3 is also an aesthetically exhilarating place to be.

more from The New Yorker here.

No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery. Yet he has never been easy to place. Each of his first 12 books, from “Some Trees” in 1956 to “A Wave” in 1984, was in some way different from what other poets were doing and from whatever Ashbery himself had just done. Critics celebrated him. But they all celebrated a different poet. Was he a romantic in the tradition of John Keats and Wallace Stevens, or an experimentalist like Gertrude Stein? A distinctively gay poet, or a writer who avoids autobiographical reference? A connoisseur of moods, or an abstract thinker concerned with identity and the nature of art?

more from the NY Times here.

///
Rice
Reetika Vazirani

And this is hunger:
     beans & rice
     beans & rice.

A pang for a meal. You’re broke.
Sweet butter on challah. In the eighties,
you had money, everybody did
until the stock market crash
when the lucky got richer.
Spiced chicken on flat wheat,
the chef at Kebabish
cooking for you. An immigrant with no papers
cooking just for you.
The drizzle & snap of oil on fire,
cumin bursting into pelao, biryani.

You rave, a deported illegal
wandering into the night air
sniffing the streets for gravy.
You are nearly crazy with the hint of it.
Keep walking.

It is Main Street & you’re a citizen.
Remember the ceremony
& all the coca-cola & hot dogs afterwards?
Or try to imagine your old life.
Being a saleslady in Virginia
is far preferable
to the old way of life
that you lived when you were a queen
called Rani in your native country & the servants
fanned you night & day when you
snapped your fingers.

///

From The New York Times:

REAPPRAISALS: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century By Tony Judt.

Without going back as far as Herodotus (who gave us the word “history” from the Greek for “enquiry”), and leaving aside Caesar and Churchill, who first made history and then wrote it, or Gibbon and Macaulay, who both sat as members of Parliament, the “engaged historian” belongs to a long and often honorable tradition. It was on display 20 years ago when The New York Times carried a full-page advertisement rebuking President Reagan, “A Reaffirmation of Principle,” signed by 63 public intellectuals (for want of a less irritating name) who included such eminent historians as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Fritz Stern.

That ad is mentioned by Tony Judt in “Reappraisals,” his exhilarating new collection of essays, by way of another rebuke, this time to liberals who “acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy,” but then he is himself one of the latest adornments of that engaged tradition. A Londoner by origin and a New Yorker by adoption, Judt was educated at Cambridge, and is now a professor at New York University and director of its Remarque Institute. N.Y.U. is no ivory tower, as it turns out: in a memorable article not included here, he described looking downtown from his office window on 9/11, to see the 21st century begin.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

The scenes are familiar from biology textbooks. A long string of DNA is copied to form a matching strand. A virus infects a cell by stealing through its membrane. Two white blood cells meet and confer before launching an immune attack. In textbooks, all these processes that are so fundamental to the lives of cells are typically depicted in drawings or static snapshots captured by powerful electron microscopes. But that’s changing. A growing revolution in imaging is making it possible for biologists to watch small-scale events as they unfold in living cells and tissues.

“The human brain is vision-focused,” says professor of molecular and cellular biology Jeff Lichtman. “If we see things, then we think we know what they mean.” To be able finally to see events that were known only in theory is incredibly satisfying for scientists. Even more important, this revolution also opens up the possibility of learning things about life that could never be studied before. Ironically, the technology enabling much of this change is the same one that launched the study of modern biology centuries ago: the light or optical microscope. A congruence of factors has shuttled these instruments back into the forefront of biology in recent years, after almost a half-century during which they were overshadowed by more powerful techniques such as electron microscopy and x-ray crystallography, which are able to create images on the level of single molecules.

More here. (Note: Do watch some of the stunning video images as well).

From Space Daily:

A team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University has found that gravitational radiation-widely expected to provide “smoking gun” proof for a theory of the early universe known as “inflation”-can be produced by another mechanism. According to physics scholars, inflation theory proposes that the universe underwent a period of exponential expansion right after the big bang.

A key prediction of inflation theory is the presence of a particular spectrum of “gravitational radiation”-ripples in the fabric of space-time that are notoriously difficult to detect but believed to exist nonetheless.

“If we see a primordial gravitational wave background, we can no longer say for sure it is due to inflation,” said Lawrence Krauss, the Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Case Western Reserve.

At the same time the researchers find that gravitational waves are a far more sensitive probe of new physics near the highest energy scale of interest to particle physicists than previously envisaged. Thus their work provides strong motivation for the ongoing quest to detect primordial gravitational radiation.

More here.  [Thanks to Pete Chapman.]

Thomas H. Maugh II in the Los Angeles Times:

An Italian team on Wednesday renewed its claim to have discovered evidence for the existence of dark matter, the invisible material that makes up the bulk of the universe.

Critics say the University of Rome team has answered some of the objections to their earlier findings but not all of them, leaving their claims still a subject of great controversy.

“This is a Nobel Prize-winning result if it is proved,” said physicist Richard Gaitskell of Brown University, who was not involved in the research. “But it needs to be confirmed, and the experiment really has to demonstrate a total mastery of the data. Neither of those criteria have been achieved, and therefore you have to bring a healthy skepticism to the result as it stands.”

The dark matter in question is called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Even though these dark-matter analogs of conventional particles are thought to be much larger than their visible-matter counterparts, they rarely interact with the visible world — making their detection extremely difficult.

At least two international projects based in the United States have been attempting to find evidence for dark matter, so far without success.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

David Edgar in The Guardian:

Martin Amis’s elegant prose shouldn’t blind us to his seeming obsession with the Muslim birth rate as a “gangplank to theocracy” (“Has feminism cost us Europe?” he asked in an Independent interview). David Goodhart, editor of left-leaning Prospect magazine (who describes the 60s as “the decade that sharply eroded authority and constraint”), argued in his pamphlet Progressive Nationalism for a two-tier welfare system, the teaching of imperial history in schools, the creation of a migration and integration ministry, the raising of citizenship test hurdles, the reassertion of the monarchy and the army as nationally binding institutions, the banning of certain forms of dress from public buildings and the reintroduction of conscription. That several of these proposals are now government policy is an indication of how Gordon Brown’s golden thread of British liberties has thickened into what looks more like a whip.

Most importantly, the culture of betrayal has blinded contemporary defectors to the significant achievements of the alliance between British Muslims and the left. Along with Phillips, Cohen and the New Statesman’s Martin Bright, Anthony is preoccupied with the Muslim Council of Britain and its spokesman Inayat Bunglawala, quoting his remark that the campaign against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses brought Muslims together and “helped develop a British Muslim identity”. In fact, Bunglawala’s attitude to Rushdie goes to the heart of whether the progressive-Muslim alliance is a genuine conversation or the contemporary equivalent to the Nazi-Soviet pact.

More here.

The Economist’s answer:

Last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16% (see chart 1). These were some of the sharpest rises in food prices ever. But this year the speed of change has accelerated. Since January, rice prices have soared 141%; the price of one variety of wheat shot up 25% in a day. Some 40km outside Abidjan, Mariam Kone, who grows sweet potatoes, okra and maize but feeds her family on imported rice, laments: “Rice is very expensive, but we don’t know why.”

The prices mainly reflect changes in demand—not problems of supply, such as harvest failure. The changes include the gentle upward pressure from people in China and India eating more grain and meat as they grow rich and the sudden, voracious appetites of western biofuels programmes, which convert cereals into fuel. This year the share of the maize (corn) crop going into ethanol in America has risen and the European Union is implementing its own biofuels targets. To make matters worse, more febrile behaviour seems to be influencing markets: export quotas by large grain producers, rumours of panic-buying by grain importers, money from hedge funds looking for new markets.

Such shifts have not been matched by comparable changes on the farm. This is partly because they cannot be: farmers always take a while to respond. It is also because governments have softened the impact of price rises on domestic markets, muffling the signals that would otherwise have encouraged farmers to grow more food.

And over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin chimes in:

A second important point is the impact of demand from the biofuel sector, particularly for corn in the US. The idea of making biofuels from food crops was always problematic and the subsidy regime in the US makes it more so. The current food crisis should make subsidies for food-based biofuels politically and economically untenable, pushing the industry away from this easy short term solution and in the direction of sources such as switch grass, grown on marginal or non-arable land.

Melinda Wenner in Scientific American:

In a new play, Alan Turing turns to a colleague in a moment of epiphany. “Mathematics,” he says triumphantly, “is a landscape riddled with holes and paradoxes. It is a chaos filled not with reasons and whys, but with contradictions and why nots.”

The mathematician may never have uttered these exact words, but his character did in Friday’s New York City workshop performance of Pure. The new play, by A. Rey Pamatmat, explores the mysterious parallels between Turing’s work and his personal life, suggesting that the chaos Turing finds in mathematics is actually a reflection of his own complexities.

Called the father of modern computer science, Turing is most famous for conceptualizing the Turing machine, an abstract machine or primitive computer that has the ability to reduce any mathematical process to a series of simple steps, and then perform it. As the play reveals, however, this is only one of a number of Turing’s contributions to science. He also devised the Turing Test to explore the limits of artificial intelligence (a machine “passes” the Turing test when it fools a person into thinking, based on its conversational skills, that it is human); he helped England break German naval codes in World War II; and he modeled biological processes such as plant structures using mathematical formulas like the Fibonacci sequence. The play communicates his complex ideas through Turing’s character as he tries to convince his colleagues of the importance of his work.

Prasant Jha in openDemocracy:

The results of the general election in Nepal on 10 April 2008, won overwhelmingly by the Maoists – officially the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) – have come as a complete shock. Many people thought the former armed rebels would be a distant third, winning perhaps fifteen-to-twenty of the 240 seats directly elected to the constituent assembly under a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system (335 of the remainder are elected under proportional representation). Some argued that the Maoists would do better than conventional wisdom in the capital Kathmandu suggested, giving them about thirty-to-forty of the FPTP seats. Only a few voices sensed the people’s desperate yearning for change, the Maoist base among the young and marginalised, and flagged the possibility of the party coming in second – or first.

Yet the outcome – with the Maoists taking 114 out of the 208 seats declared at the time of writing – has taken even the Maoists by surprise. Why did all of us get it so wrong? It is important that no elections had taken place since May 1999; recent voting patterns were thus non-existent, and it was difficult to make sense of a country that had completely changed over the past decade. An armed rebellion, a generational change, new leftwing politics, ethnic consciousness, and changing aspirations – all these should have complicated the easy predictions.

In the NYT, Larry Bartels on the importance of class issues to the white, small-town American working class:

Last week in Terre Haute, Ind., Mr. Obama explained that the people he had in mind “don’t vote on economic issues, because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them.” He added: “So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.”

This is a remarkably detailed and vivid account of the political sociology of the American electorate. What is even more remarkable is that it is wrong on virtually every count.

Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.

NYU president John Sexton has been promised a blank check to duplicate his university on a desert island in Abu Dhabi. The expansion will leave both campuses flush with petrodollars. But to many faculty, the deal amounts to a sellout.

Zvika Krieger in New York Magazine:

Within less than three years, NYU plans to more or less clone itself in Abu Dhabi, thereby becoming the first major U.S. research institution to open a complete liberal-arts university off American soil. It is a wildly ambitious project, far more grandiose than simply opening up a foreign branch or study-abroad program. Unlike any other major American university, NYU will treat its offshore campus as virtually equal to its New York campus. NYU Abu Dhabi students will be chosen by the same admissions procedure, and will graduate with the same degrees, as their Washington Square colleagues. Eventually, Sexton hopes that New York and Abu Dhabi will serve as two nodes for a global network of NYU programs and classes.

The financing of the deal is equally extraordinary. The city-state of Abu Dhabi, having already committed a $50 million “gift” (effectively a down payment) to the university, has promised to finance the entire Middle East campus and a good deal of NYU New York as well. “This is not just study abroad on steroids,” says Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, a professor of globalization and education at NYU. “This is really upping the ante. It will be a complete game-changer for higher education as we know it.”

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Once or twice in a lifetime, if you are lucky, the whole madness of painting seems to pass in front of your eyes. It felt that way to me in New York this spring, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where two great exhibitions – one exploring Nicolas Poussin’s role in the invention of the genre we call ‘landscape’, the other an endless, stupendous retrospective of Gustave Courbet – are happening a few corridors apart. I stumbled to and fro between them day after day, elated and disoriented. They sum up so much – too much – of what painting in Europe was capable of, and they embed that achievement so palpably in a certain history. Behind the glistening meadows and the huntsmen in the snow one catches the smell of autocracy and public burnings, of permanent warfare and bankers with impeccable taste.

I have found over the years that looking at Courbet and Poussin leads a viewer in contrary directions. Sometimes it matters intensely, and seems to be the key to these paintings’ mysteries, that they were made for Lyon silk merchants or left-leaning notables from the Franche-Comté, and that the Fronde or the Commune are just off-stage. (Breton put it this way in Nadja: ‘The magnificent light in Courbet’s pictures is for me the same as that in the Place Vendôme at the moment the column fell.’) But these are also objects that speak to their makers’ deep, naive absorption in the material practice of painting. They live in the confines of oil on canvas, delighting in procedure, hiding there from principalities and powers. Wildly different as the two men were temperamentally, their art shares an expository tone. They are both concerned to spell out the true nature and proper province of their craft. Therefore the impossible question ‘What is painting?’ tends to occur in front of the work they have left us.

more form the LRB here.