Is it considered bad manners to question the choice of a Nobel laureate from one’s own country? If so, the French writer Frédéric-Yves Jeannet could be accused of a flagrant display of rudeness. In a diatribe in Le Monde’s “Débats” section recently, under the heading “Jean-Marie Le Clézio ou le Nobel immérité”, Jeannet, who is also a professor of literature at the University of Wellington in New Zealand, states that “it is not politically correct . . . to criticize Le Clézio, who is such an upholder, in these times of great confusion, of fine sentiments and noble causes” (see NB, October 17, for the announcement of the prize). He goes on to say that fine sentiments and noble causes don’t necessarily make for good literature. As if to bolster his position, Jeannet points out that, in 1985, someone he holds in high regard, but doesn’t name, wrote a piece stating that the award of the Nobel Prize that year to Claude Simon was a mark of shame for French literature (until Le Clézio, Simon had been the most recent French recipient of the award – if one excludes the Chinese writer in exile Gao Xingjian, who has French nationality and was Nobelled in 2000; Le Clézio, incidentally, has hailed Simon as “a marvellous writer”). Jeannet goes so far as to suggest that Hélène Cixous, or even Amélie Nothomb, might have been a more worthy French laureate. One could add Michel Tournier’s name to the mix, although his output, unlike Le Clézio’s, has slowed up considerably in recent years. Jeannet contends that only Le Clézio’s early fiction (which he admires) fits the Nobel committee’s assessment of his work as representing “rupture”. But the committee, in its curiously worded citation, also commended him as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, an explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation” – allusions to the writer’s passionate interest in non-European cultures and to novels chronicling lives of the downtrodden and dispossessed.

more from the TLS here.

Matt Mendelsohn in the New York Times:

I’d spent most of election night in front of the TV in Arlington, Va. But around 11 p.m. I couldn’t sit idle any longer, which is why I sped to the memorial. When I arrived, I found a TV crew sitting on the plaza above the Reflecting Pool, waiting, I assumed, for a mob to arrive. I approached with cameras in hand. One of them looked up and said with a slight roll of his eyes, “Nothing to see here.”

And so I climbed the memorial steps and came upon that small group listening to the radio. (What is it about people gathered around a transistor radio?) Surely there was someone else around — a videographer, a print reporter. But there wasn’t. I felt for the TV guy. The crowd standing in the shadow of Lincoln had the scoop, a profound event to themselves, of the people and by the people.

More here.

Arjun Appadurai at The Immanent Frame:

I regret that we are forced to catch the special aura of this election without a deep and serious space for the idea of magic, magic as it used to be. It would help us fill this rhetorical void. It would let us name the un-nameable and it would let us enjoy our means even without certainty about our ends. It would let us enjoy this week without dragging it immediately into boring predictions about what Nancy Pelosi will do, about how many huge headaches Obama will face, about how heavy the coming storm will be, and how fragile our collective sources. We have hardly crowned Obama and we have promptly begun to mourn for him, as if he is has already been vanquished by his foes. In the name of hard talk and pragmatism, realistic expectations and balanced judgments, rolling up our sleeves and keen to fix the leaks in the roof and the flood in the basement, we are refusing ourselves the joy of inhabiting what David Gregory called the transcendent, for it is too close to the language of official religion to be acceptable or satisfying for too long.

Magic, anthropologists have always known, is about what people throughout the world do when faced with uncertainty, catastrophic damage, injustice, illness, suffering or harm, while ritual (also magical in its logic) is performed to forestall or prevent these very things. Magic is not about deficient logic, childish mental mistakes, clever priestly illusions or other mistaken technologies. It is the universal feeling that what we see and feel exceeds our knowledge, our understanding and our control.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

The poisonous dart frogs use conspicuous color to tell predators that they are not good to eat. Similarly, a venomous coral snake sports rings of bright color to advertise that it isn’t to be messed with—by a bird considering it for lunch, for instance—while a milk snake, which isn’t poisonous and could be taken quite safely, looks much like a coral snake and trades on the latter’s reputation. Bauer fellow Marcus Kronforst studies a bad-tasting species of butterfly that is orange, black, and yellow, and other species of unsavory butterflies that mimic its color and pattern to form a uniformed corps of the unappetizing. Colors can conceal as well as warn, as in, “You can’t eat me because you can’t see me—I’m a cuttlefish and can change my color to match my background in a millisecond.” Or, conversely, “I’m so well camouflaged with stripes [or spots] that you can’t see me creeping up…and I’m going to eat you.” Hopi Hoekstra, Loeb associate professor of the natural sciences, studies the genetic mechanisms at work in a species of mouse that adapts to its environment by being sand-colored if it lives at the beach and dark if it lives inland.

Perhaps some of the richest language of color has to do with sex. Janis Sacco, director of exhibitions, offers such examples as a male bird of paradise from New Guinea that not only sports much bolder colors than any female of the species, but also a ludicrously long tail. “Pick me as a mate,” he says, “because I have this splendid thing you females may select mates on the basis of, and I must be fit because I have managed to survive despite having to carry it around with me while wearing these obvious colors.”

More here.

Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times:

A horrifying act stood at the center of Toni Morrison’s 1987 masterwork, “Beloved”: a runaway slave, caught in her effort to escape, cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw, determined to spare the girl the fate she herself has suffered as a slave. A similarly indelible act stands at the center of Ms. Morrison’s remarkable new novella, “A Mercy,” a small, plangent gem of a story that is, at once, a kind of prelude to “Beloved” and a variation on that earlier book’s exploration of the personal costs of slavery — a system that moves men and women and children around “like checkers” and casts a looming shadow over both parental and romantic love.

Set some 200 years before “Beloved,” “A Mercy” conjures up the beautiful, untamed, lawless world that was America in the 17th century with the same sort of lyrical, verdant prose that distinguished that earlier novel. Gone are the didactic language and schematic architecture that hobbled the author’s 1998 novel, “Paradise”; gone are the cartoonish characters that marred her 2003 novel, “Love.” Instead Ms. Morrison has rediscovered an urgent, poetic voice that enables her to move back and forth with immediacy and ease between the worlds of history and myth, between ordinary daily life and the realm of fable.

All the central characters in this story are orphans, cast off by their parents or swept away from their families by acts of God or nature or human cruelty — literal or figurative exiles susceptible to the centrifugal forces of history.

More here.

Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books:

“Outside his poems Cavafy does not exist.” Seventy-five years after the death of “the Alexandrian” (as he is known in Greece), the early verdict of his fellow poet George Seferis—which must have seemed rather harsh in 1946, when the Constantine Cavafy who had existed in flesh and blood was still a living memory for many people—seems only to gain in validity. That flesh-and-blood existence was, after all, fairly unremarkable: a middling job as a government bureaucrat, a modest, even parsimonious routine, no great fame or recognition until relatively late (and even then hardly great), a private life of homosexual encounters kept so discreet that even today its content, as much as there was content, remains largely unknown to us.

All this—the mediocrity, the obscurity (whether intentional or not)—stands in such marked contrast to the poetry, with its haunted memories of seethingly passionate encounters in the present and its astoundingly rich imagination of the remote Greek past, from Homer to Byzantium, from Alexandria and Rome to barely Hellenized provincial cities in the Punjab, that it has been hard not to agree with Seferis that the “real” life of the poet was, in fact, almost completely interior; and that outside that imagination and those memories, there was little of lasting interest.

More here.

How good was 538? This good. The only state their model got wrong was Indiana, where they expected a narrow Obama loss. He won the state by a hair. Nate Silver owned this election on the polling front: one young guy with a background in baseball stats beat out the mainstream media in a couple of months. And he beat out the old web: I mean if you consider the total joke of Drudge’s recent coverage and compare it with Silver’s, you realize that the web is a brutal competitive medium where only the best survive – and they are only as good as their last few posts.

If you want to know why newspapers are dying: that’s why. They’re just not as good as the web at its best. This election proved that beyond any doubt. For the record, I think the WSJ and the WaPo and the NYT and the Anchorage Daily News rocked in this election. Most of the rest of the old media: not so much.

from Andrew Sullivan.

The presidential race entered a critical three-day period in September when the economic crisis cast the candidates’ differences in sharp relief.

On Sept. 24, with financial markets verging on panic and the economy thudding, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama placed a call to rival John McCain. He wanted to suggest they issue a joint statement on proposed financial-bailout legislation. As hours went by without a return call, Obama aides emailed each other, asking, “Have you heard anything?” One answered: “The McCain camp is cooking up something.”

Later that day, Sen. McCain went before the cameras to say he was suspending his campaign to focus on helping craft the legislation. “What does that mean — suspend the campaign?” Sen. Obama asked his staff on the trail, according to aides. At a news conference in Florida, he said, “It’s going to be part of the president’s job to be able to deal with more than one thing at once.”

Beyond the economic tumult, troubles in the McCain camp had contributed to the Republican’s extraordinary move. These included a shaky performance by his running mate in a mock debate and an admonition to Sen. McCain by some major donors to quit blasting Wall Street and focus on solutions. Suspending the campaign, one McCain adviser recalls hoping, would let them “push the reset button.”

more from the WSJ here.

IN THE television coverage of Barack Obama’s electoral victory, pollsters and strategists kept invoking an unexpected year: 1964. This was the pier that number-crunchers threw a line to in an effort to anchor Obama’s election to the recent American past. In coming days, they promised, a thorough breakdown of voting numbers would reveal what had really happened, how voting patterns had gone, and whether a historic realignment had occurred. But in the midst of qualifications and presentiments a kind of intuitive connection seemed available to these specialists that the rest of us wouldn’t possess. Nineteen sixty-four, the last year a Democratic candidate won Virginia. Nineteen sixty-four, the last time a Democratic candidate had so large a share of the popular vote.

I think 1964 looms large in the consciousness of Obama’s victory for other reasons, which have nothing to do with the vote. Something remains in the story of Obama’s triumph that can shape a fantasy of our American twenty-first century as another chance at the late twentieth century with certain segments of our past sliced out.

more from Dissent here.

Andrew Gelman, whose book you should really read, explains how the election was won:

3.  The gap between young and old has increased–a lot:

But there was no massive turnout among young voters. According to the exit polls, 18% of the voters this time were under 30, as compared to 17% of voters in 2004. (By comparison, 22% of voting-age Americans are under 30.)

4. By ethnicity: Barack Obama won 96% of African Americans, 68% of Latinos, 64% of Asians, and 44% of whites. In 2004, Kerry won 89% of African Americans, 55% of Latinos, 56% of Asians, and 41% of whites. So Obama gained the most among ethnic minorities.

5.  The red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing.  See this state-by-state scatterplot of Obama vote in 2008 vs. Kerry vote in 2004:

I know that the chances are very small and that many would disagree, but in this environment and for this crisis how interesting would the pick of Paul Davidson for Secretary of the Treasury be?!? Davidson on evaluating toxic assets:

In the good old days, before “securtization “, when a bank made a loan, especially a mortgage loan, the loan contract was basically an illiquid asset that was listed on the asset side of the bank’s balance sheet. What value was put on these illiquid assets on the balance sheet? If there was no market for these illiquid assets — one cannot mark to market the asset!! So they assets were typically carried on the balance sheet at the value of the outstanding loan — until, it was
paid off — or defaulted on!

Now a good neoclassical theorist would have said that the value of the outstanding loan contract is the computed present value of the future stream of cash receipts including the discounted value of the pay off of the principle (in the case of an interest only loan). Of course, the implicit neoclassical assumption underlying this type of present value calculation is that the future was “known” at least with statistical reliability, i.e., the future is determined as an ergodic stochastic  process. If the future stream of payments are known with statistical reliability, then anyone who took a course in economics can calculate the “objective” actuarial present value. (And remember under the rational expectations hypothesis – the subjective probability distribution equals the objective probability distribution that governs future outcomes.)

If, however, the future is uncertain, i.e., nonergodic, then the present value depends on the subjective evaluation as to whether all the contractually payments specified (in monetary terms) to specific dates are actually going to be met by the borrower. A large down payment on a mortgage loan created a cushion for the banker in case a future, unpredicted, default occurred. For assets that are liquid, as I specify in my JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES (Palgrave, New York, 2007) book and the “securitization” article in CHALLENGE, there must be an well-organized and orderly markets.  Liquidity requires a market maker to assure orderly markets– so that a holder can always make a fast exit and sell their holdings of any liquid asset at a price not much different that the previous transaction price. 

///
The Coney
Paul Muldoon

Although I have never learned to mow
I suddenly found myself half-way through
last year’s pea-sticks
and cauliflower stalks
in our half-acre of garden.
My father had always left the whetstone
safely wrapped
in his old, tweed cap
and balanced on one particular plank
beside the septic tank.

This past winter he had been too ill
to work. The scythe would dull
so much more quickly in my hands
than his, and was so often honed,
that while the blade
grew less and less a blade
the whetstone had entirely disappeared
and a lop-eared
coney was now curled inside the cap.
He whistled to me through the gap

in his front teeth;
‘I was wondering, chief,
if you happen to know the name
of the cauliflowers in your cold-frame
that you still hope to dibble
in this unenviable
bit of ground?’
‘They would be All the Year Round.’
‘I guessed as much’; with that he swaggered
along the diving-board

and jumped. The moment he hit the water
he lost his tattered
bathing-togs
to the swimming pool’s pack of dogs.
‘Come in’; this flayed
coney would parade
and pirouette like honey on a spoon:
‘Come on in; Paddy Muldoon.’
And although I have never learned to swim
I would willingly have followed him.

///

Farhad Manjoo in Slate:

The election’s over, and you’re bored. You’re not really elated that your guy won or dismayed that he got crushed—really, you just wish you knew what to do with yourself. Over the last few months, you’ve spent hours each day poring over polls and reading every pundit. Now all that is done, and the Web seems so … empty. Politico is full of stories about the transition team and RealClearPolitics is focused on 2012, but it’s just not the same.

I’m here to help because I’m pretty much in the same boat. Now that the election’s over, I’ve got several spare hours a day. What’ll I do? Here are some ideas.

Follow the financial crisis. The presidential race might be over, but news junkies looking for a fix are in luck—the economy looks sure to provide months of daily excitement. Of course there are many mainstream sources—the Wall Street Journal, the Times, Slate‘s sister pub The Big Money—but the Web abounds with smart bloggers who follow the financial crisis with the sort of precinct-by-precinct detail you’ve come to expect of election news.

More here.

From Edge:

Enough already. I bit my tongue when I heard that Sarah Palin believed that dinosaurs and humans once lived side by side and that she and John McCain wanted creationism taught in the public schools. And I just shook my head when McCain derided proposed funding for a sophisticated planetarium projection machine as wasteful spending on an “overhead projector.” But the Republican ticket’s war on science has finally gone too far. Last week, Sarah Palin dissed research on fruit flies.

In her usual faux-folksy style, Palin lit out after a congressional earmark involving these insects: “You’ve heard about some of these pet projects — they really don’t make a whole lot of sense — and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” (Reading this diatribe is not sufficient; only video reveals the scorn and condescension dripping from her words.)

As a geneticist, I’ve worked on fruit flies in the laboratory for three decades. I know the fruit fly. The fruit fly is a friend of mine. And believe me, Sarah Palin doesn’t know anything about fruit flies. The research Palin attacked was a perfectly valid project designed to protect American growers from the olive fruit fly, a destructive pest. But fruit-fly research is good for far more than that. The fruit fly is what we call a “model organism.” Since all animals partake of a common evolutionary history, we share basic features of physiology, development and biochemistry. And because flies are easy to study, quick to breed in the lab, and cheaper than chimps and mice, we can often use them as models for things that go wrong (or right) in our own species.

More here.

From Nature:

Barack Obama, Democratic senator from Illinois, has defeated John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, in both the electoral and popular vote. The electoral balance currently stands at 349 for Obama and 163 for McCain, according to the Washington Post; results from a few states are still pending. 270 electoral votes are needed to win. Either Obama or McCain would have represented a very different departure for science from President George W. Bush, although not perhaps that different from each other. During the campaign, Obama promised a host of changes, such as fresh investments in science and technology, including a $150-billion push in alternative energies; in his acceptance speech last night he cited “a planet in peril” among the many leading challenges for his presidency. The question now is whether those promises will be translated into reality come inauguration day on 20 January.

Senate

Thirty-five of the Senate’s 100 seats were up for grabs in this election. The Democrats strengthened their hold on the Senate, but have fallen short of the 60-seat majority that would have eased the passage of new legislation. The Washington Post reports the current balance at 54 Democratic, 40 Republican, and 2 Independent seats. But with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and in the executive branch, Democratic priorities such as climate-change legislation may now gain traction.

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

The theories known as QED and QCD are the mismatched siblings of particle physics. QED, or quantum electrodynamics, is the hard-working, conscientious older brother who put himself through night school and earned a degree in accounting. QED describes all the electromagnetic phenomena of nature, and it does so with meticulous accuracy. Calculations carried out within the framework of QED predict properties of the electron to within a few parts per trillion, and those predictions agree with experimental measurements.

QCD, or quantum chromodynamics, is the brilliant but erratic young rebel of the family, who ran off to a commune and came back with tattoos. The theory has the same basic structure as QED, but instead of electrons it applies to quarks; it describes the forces that bind those exotic entities together inside protons, neutrons and other subatomic particles. By all accounts QCD is a correct theory of quark interactions, but it has been a stubbornly unproductive one. If you tried using it to make quantitative predictions, you were lucky to get any answers at all, and accuracy was just too much to ask for.

Now the prodigal theory is finally developing some better work habits. QCD still can’t approach the remarkable precision of QED, but some QCD calculations now yield answers accurate to within a few percent. Among the new results are some thought-provoking surprises.

More here.

Editorial in the New York Times:

President Bush’s aides have been scrambling to change rules and regulations on the environment, civil liberties and abortion rights, among others — few for the good. Most presidents put on a last-minute policy stamp, but in Mr. Bush’s case it is more like a wrecking ball. We fear it could take months, or years, for the next president to identify and then undo all of the damage.

Here is a look — by no means comprehensive — at some of Mr. Bush’s recent parting gifts and those we fear are yet to come.

CIVIL LIBERTIES We don’t know all of the ways that the administration has violated Americans’ rights in the name of fighting terrorism. Last month, Attorney General Michael Mukasey rushed out new guidelines for the F.B.I. that permit agents to use chillingly intrusive techniques to collect information on Americans even where there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

More here.

From Science:

Barack Obama made history yesterday by becoming the first African American to be elected president of the United States. The many scientists who had campaigned for the Democratic senator from Illinois reveled in last night’s election returns. “We’re just very thrilled,” says physicist Bernice Durand, who had assembled a grassroots coalition of researchers supporting Obama (Science, 31 October, p. 658). The election brought mostly good news for research as well. Here’s a roundup of other developments that could have an impact on science:

Stem cells
Arguably the result most directly affecting researchers was in Michigan, where voters passed a measure that will free scientists from state restrictions on stem cell research. Proposal 2, a constitutional amendment that will go into effect next month, allows researchers to derive new human embryonic stem cell lines from embryos that would otherwise be discarded by fertility clinics. The measure supersedes a 1978 state law prohibiting the use of embryos in research. It was opposed on ethical grounds by right-to-life groups and the Catholic Church, which also raised the specter of science gone wild. Opponents even suggested that “we might try to clone cow-people,” says stem cell researcher Sean Morrison of the University of Michigan (UM) Medical School in Ann Arbor. In fact, all cloning, including somatic cell nuclear transfer for research, is still banned.

Each side reportedly spent more than $5 million in the public battle over the measure, with supporters receiving a big financial boost from Michigan developer A. Alfred Taubman. Scientists were particularly active, participating in public debates and visiting newspaper editors to lobby for the measure.

More here.

My old teacher Sidney Morgenbesser once said to Avishai Margalit that the urgent task before us is the development of a decent society.  Margalit later went on to flesh out what a “decent society” means: simply, a decent society is one that does not humiliate those who live in it.  This conception resurfaced recently  in Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s speech on the occasion of Spain’s passage deep fundamental civil rights legislation for gays, queers, and lesbians.  He said:

We are not legislating, honorable members, for people far away and not known by us. We are enlarging the opportunity for happiness to our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and our families: at the same time we are making a more decent society, because a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members.

What has happened in California is this in rewind.  The very public and directly democratic  roll-back of these rights  has made California’s a more indecent society, one in which citizens of the state have gone out of their way to humiliate fellow neighbors, co-workers, friends and family.  Sullivan on this affront and disappointment:

Heart-breaking news this morning: a terribly close vote has stripped gay couples in California of their right to marry. The geographic balance shows that the inland parts of California voted for the Proposition and the coast and urban areas voted against it.

Yes, it is heart-breaking: it is always hard to be in a tiny minority whose rights and dignity are removed by a majority. It’s a brutal rebuke to the state supreme court, and enshrinement in California’s constitution that gay couples are now second-class citizens and second class human beings. Massively funded by the Mormon church, a religious majority finally managed to put gay people in the back of the bus in the biggest state of the union. The refusal of Schwarzenegger to really oppose the measure and Obama’s luke-warm opposition didn’t help. And cruelly, a very hefty black turnout, as feared, was one of the factors that defeated us, according to the exit poll. Today this is one of the solaces to a hard right and a Republican party that sees gay people as the least real of Americans.

But I realize I am not shattered. My own marriage exists and is real without the approval of others. One day soon, it will be accepted by a majority. And this initiative in California can and will be reversed, as California’s initiatives are much more fluid than those in other states; and the younger generation is overwhelmingly – 2 to 1 – in our favor. The tide of history is behind us; but we will have to work harder to educate people about our lives and loves and humanity.

It cannot be denied that this feels like a punch in the gut. It is. I’m not going to pretend that the wound isn’t deep and personal, like an attack on my own family. It was meant to be.