Tracking who’s hot and who’s not presents an algorithmic challenge.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Back in 1999, the operators of the Lycos Internet portal began publishing a weekly list of the 50 most popular queries submitted to their Web search engine. Britney Spears—initially tagged a “teen songstress,” later a “pop tart”—was No. 2 on that first weekly tabulation. She has never fallen off the list since then—440 consecutive appearances when I last checked. Other perennials include ­Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton. What explains the enduring popularity of these celebrities, so famous for being famous? That’s a fascinating question, and the answer would doubtless tell us something deep about modern culture. But it’s not the question I’m going to take up here. What I’m trying to understand is how we can know Britney’s ranking from week to week. How are all those queries counted and categorized? What algorithm tallies them up to see which terms are the most frequent?

One challenging aspect of this task is simply coping with the volume of data. Lycos reports processing 12 million queries a day, and other search engines, such as Google, handle orders of magnitude more. But that’s only part of the problem. After all, if you have the computational infrastructure to answer all those questions about Britney and Pamela and Paris, then it doesn’t seem like much of an added burden to update a counter each time some fan submits a request. What makes the counting difficult is that you can’t just pay attention to a few popular subjects, because you can’t know in advance which ones are going to rank near the top. To be certain of catching every new trend as it unfolds, you have to monitor all the incoming queries—and their variety is unbounded.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette over at Twisted Physics, which has also moved to the Dicsovery News site:

A favorite pasttime in geek culture is pointing out scientific inconsistencies in film and TV shows — you know, like how when there’s an explosion on Star Trek, it shouldn’t make a sound because sound needs a medium through which to propagate, and deep space is pretty darn empty. (Sci-fi author/blogger John Scalzi has aptly dubbed this practice “nerdgassing.”) But a true nerd (ahem) would feel compelled to point out that, when it comes to sounds in space, this isn’t 100% accurate either. Space isn’t completely empty. There are pockets of hot ionized gas (called plasmas) lurking in the atmospheres of planets like Venus and Mars, or the moons of Jupiter, for instance.

And there’s the Earth’s atmosphere, which is a notorious emitter of something called Auroral Kilometric Radiation (AKR), a phenomenon first discovered by satellites in the early 1970s. It’s basically radio waves generated high above the Earth, caused by the same shower of solar particles that give rise to the aurora borealis (“northern lights”). So, if Captain James T. Kirk and the Enterprise crew were approaching the Earth (or Jupiter, or Saturn, which also have auroral displays and accompanying AKR) from space, most likely the first thing they’d hear would be these bizarre chirps and whistles.

For decades, astronomers monitoring the radio emissions assumed the signal propagated outward in an ever-widening cone, just like the light from a flashlight. But a new analysis by the European Space Agency’s Cluster mission shows that actually, the AKR is beamed into space in a very narrow path. Imagine placing a filter over your flashlight so the light could only emerge in a narrow slit. This is a boon to astronomers, since it enables them to trace the source of these emissions, according to Robert Mutel of the University of Iowa, a member of the three-year study. This, in turn, will make it easier to search for similar planets around other stars that might possibly harbor some form of life.

The first three postings in this series remind us how complex the individual topics of cognitive science, Buddhism, and religious experience can be. Certainly there are many interpretations of each—many more than an entire monograph could account for, let alone a column in the New York Times—and reminders of the density of such topics are valuable and need to be repeated. But the cultural phenomenon that David Brooks’s column describes is its own topic altogether. Just what this phenomenon is will probably take a while for historians to describe and for critical scholars to assess. My preliminary suggestion is that we are witnessing an aesthetic urge, in which scientists and Buddhists find common cause in their pursuit of a beautiful—albeit potentially dangerous— “theory of everything.”

more from The Immanent Frame here.

I think that an inevitable and necessary step for written culture over the next few decades is going to be the introduction of a détente between the visual and literary worlds — at the very least, an agreement to agree that they’re not mutually exclusive and that each feeds the other.The notion that literary experimentation ended with the publication of Finnegans Wake doesn’t leave much hope or inspiration for citizens on a digital planet a century later. Acknowledging the present and contemplating the future doesn’t mean discarding the past, and to be interested in print’s visual dimension isn’t the same as being anti-literary. People in the art world do a spit-take when they hear that James Joyce is called modern. The literary world has the aura of a vast museum filled with floral watercolours and alpine landscapes, a space where pickled sharks will never be contemplated or allowed. Ten-year-olds now discuss fonts, leading and flush-righting paragraphs.

Words are built of RGB pixels projected directly on to the retina for hours a day. Machines automatically translate spoken words into Japanese. Medium and message are melting into each other unlike ever before. Zulu Romeo Foxtrot.

more from Granta here.

Wherever Lewis went, the satirist in him part-relished the evils he witnessed. He was also a romantic who knew how to play the tunes of broken dreams and decay. Meanwhile, he was too intelligent and too much of a realist not to know that the victories of strong over weak are hard-wired into nature. These strands coalesce in his great essay, “Genocide”, the first of several published by the Sunday Times magazine in the 1970s and early 80s. In it, he describes the fate of Brazilian Indians at the hands not only of Portuguese colonists, American missionaries, landowners of every descent and grabbers in general of gold, diamonds and rubber, but of the government’s Indian Protection Service itself. “By the descriptions of all who had seen them”, Lewis wrote, “there were no more inoffensive and charming human beings on the planet” than the forest Indians. A population of about 4 million (Lewis excitably multiplied it to 80 million) had been reduced to what was in the 1960s calculated as 100,000 – Munducurus, Cintas Largas, the Bororos among whom Claude Lévi-Strauss lived in the 1930s – and “the imagination reels at the thought of what lies in store”. The imagination reels: this is the keynote. Lewis’s subject – his lifelong theme – is mankind’s war against humanity. As Wallace Stevens had written, “In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of imagination”.

more from the TLS here.

3QD friend Carl Zimmer has moved his brilliant blog, The Loom, to a new location at Discover magazine. This fascinating entry is from there:

Sometimes a species is so complex, so marvelous, or simply so weird that it’s hard to imagine how it could have possibly evolved by natural selection. Among the weirdest is the flounder.

Not many animals would be at home in a world made by Picasso, but the flounder would fit right in. It belongs to a group of fish called flatfish, or pleuronectiforms, that all spend their adult lives hugging the sea floor, where they ambush smaller fish. Flatfish are teleosts, a huge group of fish species that include more conventional creatures like trout and goldfish. While they have a lot of teleost anatomy, flatfishes also have some bizarre adaptations for their life at ninety degrees. All vertebrates, ourselves included, use hair cells in the inner ear to keep ourselves balanced. In most flatfish species, the hairs have rotated so that swimming sideways feels normal to them. Many flatfish can camouflage the upward-facing side of their body. The underside is pale, and in many species the fin is tiny.

And then, of course, there are the eyes.

On a typical teleost like a goldfish, the eyes face out from either side of its head. On a flounder, both eyes sit on one side, gazing upwards. It takes time for this Picasso-esque anatomy to emerge: flatfish are born with eyes in the normal position, but as they grow, one eye moves across its head to join its partner. To accommodate this migrant, the bones of the flatfish head twist and turn to make room.

More here.

///
Auguries of Inncoence
William Blake

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.
….

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

A dove house fill’d with doves & Pigeons

Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.

A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate

Predicts the ruin of the State.

A Horse misus’d upon the Road

Calls to Heaven for Human blood.

Each outcry of the hunted Hare

A fibre from the Brain does tear.

A Skylark wounded in the wing,

A Cherubim does cease to sing.

The Game Cock clipp’d and arm’d for fight

Does the Rising Sun affright.

Every Wolf’s & Lion’s howl

Raises from Hell a Human Soul.

The wild deer, wand’ring here & there,

Keeps the Human Soul from Care.

The Lamb misus’d breeds public strife

And yet forgives the Butcher’s Knife.

The Bat that flits at close of Eve

Has left the Brain that won’t believe.

The Owl that calls upon the Night

Speaks the Unbeliever’s fright.

He who shall hurt the little Wren

Shall never be belov’d by Men.

He who the Ox to wrath has mov’d

Shall never be by Woman lov’d.

The wanton Boy that kills the Fly

Shall feel the Spider’s enmity.

He who torments the Chafer’s sprite

Weaves a Bower in endless Night.

The Caterpillar on the Leaf

Repeats to thee thy Mother’s grief.

Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly,

For the Last Judgement draweth nigh.

He who shall train the Horse to War

Shall never pass the Polar Bar.

The Beggar’s Dog & Widow’s Cat,

Feed them & thou wilt grow fat.

The Gnat that sings his Summer’s song

Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.

The poison of the Snake & Newt

Is the sweat of Envy’s Foot.

The poison of the Honey Bee

Is the Artist’s Jealousy.

The Prince’s Robes & Beggars’ Rags

Are Toadstools on the Miser’s Bags.

A truth that’s told with bad intent

Beats all the Lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so;

Man was made for Joy & Woe;

And when this we rightly know

Thro’ the World we safely go.

Joy & Woe are woven fine,

A Clothing for the Soul divine;

Under every grief & pine

Runs a joy with silken twine.

The Babe is more than swaddling Bands;

Throughout all these Human Lands

Tools were made, & born were hands,

Every Farmer Understands.

Every Tear from Every Eye

Becomes a Babe in Eternity.

This is caught by Females bright

And return’d to its own delight.

The Bleat, the Bark, Bellow & Roar

Are Waves that Beat on Heaven’s Shore.

The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath

Writes Revenge in realms of death.

The Beggar’s Rags, fluttering in Air,

Does to Rags the Heavens tear.

The Soldier arm’d with Sword & Gun,

Palsied strikes the Summer’s Sun.

The poor Man’s Farthing is worth more

Than all the Gold on Afric’s Shore.

One Mite wrung from the Labrer’s hands

Shall buy & sell the Miser’s lands:

Or, if protected from on high,

Does that whole Nation sell & buy.

He who mocks the Infant’s Faith

Shall be mock’d in Age & Death.

He who shall teach the Child to Doubt

The rotting Grave shall ne’er get out.

He who respects the Infant’s faith

Triumph’s over Hell & Death.

The Child’s Toys & the Old Man’s Reasons

Are the Fruits of the Two seasons.

The Questioner, who sits so sly,

Shall never know how to Reply.

He who replies to words of Doubt

Doth put the Light of Knowledge out.

The Strongest Poison ever known

Came from Caesar’s Laurel Crown.

Nought can deform the Human Race

Like the Armour’s iron brace.

When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow

To peaceful Arts shall Envy Bow.

A Riddle or the Cricket’s Cry

Is to Doubt a fit Reply.

The Emmet’s Inch & Eagle’s Mile

Make Lame Philosophy to smile.

He who Doubts from what he sees

Will ne’er believe, do what you Please.

If the Sun & Moon should doubt

They’d immediately Go out.

To be in a Passion you Good may do,

But no Good if a Passion is in you.

The Whore & Gambler, by the State

Licenc’d, build that Nation’s Fate.

The Harlot’s cry from Street to Street

Shall weave Old England’s winding Sheet.

The Winner’s Shout, the Loser’s Curse,

Dance before dead England’s Hearse.

Every Night & every Morn

Some to Misery are Born.

Every Morn & every Night

Some are Born to sweet Delight.

Some are born to Endless Night.

We are led to Believe a Lie

When we see not Thro’ the Eye

Which was Born in a Night to Perish in a Night

When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.

God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in the Night,
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day.

///.

Benjamin Barber in Reset:

There is a powerful rhetoric around today that claims Islam – not just fundamentalist or Wahhabist or Safalist Islam, but Islam itself is a religion hostile to democracy. Hostile not only to liberty, pluralism and the open society, but to modernity itself as it is defined by liberal values. The attitude evident in Samuel Huntington’s discredited notion of a “clash of civilizations” in which the West and the rest are locked in a struggle for survival, so foreign to discussions like our here in Istanbul, in fact remains ubiquitous in Western politics and media.

It is found not only in Bush’s zealous conduct of a disastrous war on the “axis of evil,” or Donald Rumsfeld’s assertion that Islamic fundamentalism is a “new form of fascism;” or in right wing paranoiac events like David Horowitz’s “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” but is reflected also in writings of liberals like Paul Berman who talk about how the West is “beset with terrorists from the Muslim totalitarian movements who have already killed an astounding number of people;” or in scholars like Bernard Lewis who announce in hushed tones of sympathy that “the world of Islam has become poor, weak and ignorant;” or in Muslim apostates like Ali Hirsi who combine a seemingly liberal appeal to feminist values with a total rejection of not just fundamentalism but Islam itself.

These arguments may in their polemical zealotry beyond rational rebuttal, but Professor Habermas would I think prefer that they be rationally confronted and refuted. That is certainly my view if we wish to get on with the difficult work of crafting democracy in societies that take religion seriously – nearly all societies. I want to offer six straightforward arguments, some historical, some sociological, and some philosophical – all reasonable and commonsensical in the broader sense of rational – that suggest why it is absurd to think that Islam cannot accommodate democracy or that democracy cannot accommodate Islam.

More here.

From Nature:

A trio of fossilized fish has finally settled an evolutionary conundrum that once puzzled Charles Darwin. The flatfish has always been regarded as an oddity. Although the immature fish has eyes on opposite sides of its head, one of the eyes migrates around its skull before it reaches maturity. Yet there was no evidence for this development process in the fossil record.

Some evolutionary biologists, including Darwin, have argued that the trait evolved gradually over many generations of flatfish. If true, intermediate flatfish with partially offset eyes would once have lived — but no such fossils have ever been identified, giving succour to both creationists and those arguing for sudden jumps in evolution. But Matt Friedman, a PhD student studying evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has now found three examples of these transitional forms. In the process, he unearthed an entirely new species of ancient flatfish in Vienna and re-interpreted already known fossil fish in London.

More here.

This is not, however, a misery memoir, but a profound meditation on the depth of change triggered by the events of 1989 throughout eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It is also poignant, unbearably so at times, as she tries, but often fails, to defy the fatalism that she marks as a particular Bulgarian characteristic.

Kassabova grew up under the ominous and literally poisonous shadow of Kremikovtsi, the largest metallurgical works in eastern Europe, in Bloc 3 of the housing estate known simply as Youth. The grotty high-rise reflected Bulgarian society – neglect and hypocrisy were eating away at the foundations of lofty ideals rendered senseless through ritual repetition. Even for those wielding power, the system had become meaningless.

more from The Guardian here.

Pixar’s post-apocalyptic love story Wall-E finished No. 2 at the box office over the Fourth of July weekend after hauling in $65 million the weekend before. The film depicts a future Earth abandoned by humans, blanketed in garbage, and nearly devoid of life. At the outset, Wall-E, a robot, has but one companion: a friendly cockroach. How did we come to believe that cockroaches will outlive everything else on Earth?

The cockroach survival myth seems to have originated with the development of the atom bomb. In The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore, journalist Richard Schweid notes that roaches were reported to have survived the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading some to believe that they would inherit the Earth after a nuclear war. This idea spread during the 1960s, in part due to its dissemination by anti-nuclear activists. For example, a famous advertisement sponsored by the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and referenced in a 1968 New York Times article read, in part, “A nuclear war, if it comes, will not be won by the Americans … the Russians … the Chinese. The winner of World War III will be the cockroach.”

more from Slate here.

The Boston Review has a special issue on incarceration and what happens afterwards, with pieces by Bruce Western, Mary F. Katzenstein and Mary L. Shanley, and Robert Perkinson.  Western:

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall described citizenship as the “basic human equality associated with full membership in a community.” By this measure, thirty years of prison growth concentrated among the poorest in society has diminished American citizenship. But as the prison boom attains new heights, the conversation about criminal punishment may finally be shifting.

For the first time in decades, political leaders seem willing to consider the toll of rising incarceration rates. In October last year, Senator Jim Webb convened hearings of the Joint Economic Committee on the social costs of mass incarceration. In opening the hearings, Senator Webb made a remarkable observation, “With the world’s largest prison population,” he said, “our prisons test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity.” Like T.H. Marshall, Webb recognized that our political compact is based on a fundamental equality among citizens. Deep inequalities stretch the bonds of citizenship and ultimately imperil the quality of democracy. Extraordinary in the current political climate, Webb inquired into the prison’s significance, not just for crime, but also for social inequality. The incarceration bubble has not burst yet, but Webb’s hearings are one signal of a welcome thaw in tough-on-crime politics.

There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control.

First, Ewen Callaway in New Scientist:

To determine whether these differences carry over to unspoken communication, Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues asked 40 native speakers of Chinese, Turkish, English and Spanish to mime scenarios shown on a computer screen using only their hands and body.

These included a boy drinking a bottle of soda and a ship’s captain swinging a pail of water.

Regardless of the order used in their native spoken language, most of the volunteers communicated with a subject-object-verb construction.

“We actually thought we were going to get gestures that just matched your speech,” Goldin-Meadow says.

In a separate experiment, she asked volunteers to reconstruct a scenario using transparencies depicting different elements. Again, people of all cultures tended to arrange the transparencies in subject-object-verb order.

Next, David Beaver’s reaction over at Language Log:

We have a hypothesis, that SOV [subject object verb] is an innate linguistic trait, and we have a suggestion from Goldin-Meadow about how to test it: look at non-linguistic representations, and if the same order is found in non-linguistic representations, then there’s no reason to think that SOV is a specifically linguistic trait.

Fast-forward to the present. Goldin-Meadow has now finished doing the work. And she’s found that the same order is indeed used in non-linguistic representations. Ergo we’ve no evidence at all that the SOV preference is “an innate linguistic trait.” No evidence of syntax etched into the brain. If only the new New Scientist reporter had started his working day by reading what the old New Scientist reporter had written.

The discussion in the Goldin-Meadow PNAS article is completely in tune with her comments in the earlier New Scientist article (and, incidentally, with my own immediate reactions, as reported earlier), and out of tune with the way she is reported in the new New Scientist article. The PNAS article suggests that a basic order of Actor-Patient-Action (thus ArPA order, where “Patient” is one way linguists describe things that are acted upon) is cognitively natural, independently of language. That is, to the extent that anything is “etched into our brains” it’s not sentence syntax, but a way of thinking about events.

Benzene over at Benzene 4 (via Andrew Gelman):

Months ago, I read a serious analysis of the dynamics and economics of the news business. (Alas, I don’t remember where.) Among the observations was that a TV journalist’s career success is strongly correlated to how well-known he is to the audience, which in turn is strongly correlated to how much face time he gets. When you watch an interview on TV, if most of what you see are is person being interviewed, you won’t remember the journalist so much. If more of your time is devoted to watching and hearing the interviewer talk, he’ll be more recognizable next time. The latter probably does not make for a better interview, but it does make for a better chance of the journalist getting more gigs.

Quite likely, some ambitious journalists are well aware of this and they make a concerted effort to maximize their face time in furtherance of their careers. But even if they don’t do it on purpose, the result is the same. If some journalists tend to hog the screen just by natural inclination, those hogs are going to become better-known; that will get them more gigs, which will make them even more well-known, driving out the meeker journalists who prefer to let the interviewee do most of the talking.

This is why we have a news media full of obnoxious TV journalists who hound their guests with stupid and unanswerable “gotcha” questions. This is why, on the rare occasion that a guest actually tries to explain something with more than one sentence, the interviewer loudly interrupts, “Stop dodging the question, Senator. Give me an answer, yes or no!” This interruption is essential to the interviewer’s viability as a journalist. Without it, the camera might stay off him for more than ten precious seconds.

With that in mind, I want to make a deal with the journalists: Let’s agree that from now on the TV cameras will always be pointed at the guy who isn’t talking. I realize that’s stupid. Obviously, I’d rather see the facial expression of the person who is saying something. But if that’s the price we have to pay to get journalists to shut the hell up and let the guest talk, it would be worth it.

Bob Moser in The Nation:

[I]n the March presidential primaries, a startling show of Democratic enthusiasm was the big story buried under the Clinton/Obama headlines: just 1.3 million Texans voted Republican, while nearly 2.9 million voted Democratic–more than voted here in either of the last two general elections for Gore or Kerry. Political scientists are projecting that Bush Country will morph, by 2020, into the nation’s second-largest Democratic state. “Texas,” Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean enthused during the DNC’s rules committee showdown in May, “is ready to turn blue.”

Yes, Texas.

“Until three years ago, the Texas Democratic Party was just brain-dead and prostrate,” says Southern Methodist University professor Cal Jillson, author of Texas Politics: Governing the Lone Star State. “They were beaten down. During the Bush years, people wouldn’t even admit to being Democrats in Texas. Now they’re up on their hind legs, feeling confident. It’s the Republicans who are sullen and downcast.”

What in the name of Sam Houston is going on down here?

Olivia Judson over at NYT blog, The Wild Side:

It always happens the same way. A glance around the room to make sure no one else is listening. A clearing of the throat. A lowering of the voice to a conspiratorial tone. Then, the confession.

“I’ve never read ‘On the Origin of Species.’  I tried, but I thought it was boring.”

Thus, a number of eminent scientists — biologists all — have spoken.  Or rather, whispered.

As the first major statement on evolution and how it works, Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” not only transformed the way we humans see ourselves. It marks the beginning of modern biology. But reading it is evidently not a prerequisite for a successful career in biology — not even for those studying evolution.

Which is not surprising. The book was written almost 150 years ago, and the subject has (needless to say) evolved since then. Moreover, the central enduring idea in the “Origin” — evolution by natural selection — can be learned from any number of textbooks.

Nonetheless, those confessions made me wonder. Does the “Origin” have anything fresh to say to a modern reader? Or is it simply of historical interest?

From The Atlantic Monthly:

The characters of Meg Wolitzer’s latest novel are so insightful and articulate that it’s a pleasure to listen to them think.

Wolitzer’s engaging novel focuses on women who are breath-takingly educated and fully prepared to fill the most-rigorous roles in the workplace, but who nevertheless spend a good portion of what might have been peak career-building time fully engrossed in child-rearing and homemaking. They have the resources — both external and internal — to be well-satisfied by such a course. At the same time, though, these women are the most inclined to doubt and wonder: having had the opportunity to make any choice at all, did they make the right one? And once they no longer have “the excuse of having a young child at home to use as a human shield against all questions about what [they] ‘did,'” what then? With a light but needle-sharp touch and in a tone at once thoughtful and witty, Wolitzer explores this theme from nearly every possible angle. The cast of this richly peopled story features a group of likable friends in contemporary Manhattan with a wide range of talents and backgrounds, but also reaches back to include their mothers and out to incorporate a friend who has moved to the suburbs. Throughout, Wolitzer draws both fine and significant distinctions as she identifies types that her readers will recognize: the artist who didn’t have the necessary single-minded drive; the promising student who lost her way once she finished her classes; the English major who pragmatically chose the “enclosed pasture” of law school over the “open field&” of literature. Her characters never collapse into stereotype. Among working mothers, for instance, she distinguishes between those in whom the strain was obvious — “they had folders clutched in one hand and a child’s science project involving a potato and a battery in the other” — and the occasional, depressingly enviable one who managed to be feminine and maternal while possessing “power in the hard-shelled, armed male world.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

The would-be president’s taste in fiction runs to full-bodied American classics like Moby Dick and heavyweight contemporary novelists such as Philip Roth, Toni Morrison and EL Doctorow (apparently his second favourite author after Shakespeare). Where George W Bush once peevishly retorted that his favourite philosopher was “Jesus Christ”, Obama devours Friedrich (“God is dead”) Nietzsche and Reinhold Niebuhr, the author of the provocative Moral Man and Immoral Society. For good measure, his enthusiastic endorsement of Malcolm X’s autobiography risks stoking the embers of the Jeremiah Wright scandal all over again.

According to Salon, “If Obama is elected he’ll be one of the most literary presidents in recent memory.” Not that there is much competition. Evidence suggests that the voters prefer their presidents to be men of action; street-smart as opposed to cerebral. Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson were too busy wheeling and dealing to relax with a hardback, while the current incumbent once joked that he wanted to see more “books with bigger print” in the White House. Even JFK, who won a Pulitzer for his Profiles in Courage, reportedly didn’t range far beyond the works of Ian Fleming.

Yet now even John McCain seems to be getting in on the act. The Republican nominee recently named Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls as his favourite novel and claimed its hero (a principled American, prepared to give his life in the fight against fascism) is his role model for life. “There is nobody I’d rather be than Robert Jordan,” he said.

More here.

///
Balance
Aviva Englander Cristy

Last week the origin was piled
with dust in the corner
when I swept. I wonder now
how we manage to hold
these widening circles so tight.

In the window the birds
are held by tiny feet
and breathless balance
on a thin metal thread.

We learn to stand
by balancing the origin.

Which stillness will hold
itself in your view
one moment longer?

In one still life the bones
in the foot of a bird
curve perfectly around
the electrical wire, leaving
no room for error or fall.

//