From The New York Times:

In 2007, Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Middle East Program, told Iranian intelligence everything she knew. She was interrogated for almost eight months, nearly four of them inside Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. During that time, she explained the institutional structure of the Wilson Center, identified its board members and described her work organizing conferences. She translated reams of material from the center’s Web site into Farsi. But it was a dialogue of the deaf.

More here.

Sadanand Date, an additional commissioner of police for central Mumbai, was not supposed to be at Cama. The attacks were taking place out of his jurisdiction. But he was asked to go to CST and headed to the hospital as soon as he heard the gunmen had moved on, stopping on the way at a police station to get a carbine issued. It was his team that penetrated the hospital to face heavy fire and grenades from Kasab and Ismail, who they had isolated on the sixth floor. At 11:19 he made his first call to control for backup. Six more calls were made, with no response. The seventh, at 11:28, went through moments after a grenade blast critically injured two men; Date’s right eye was blinded by shrapnel. “Central Region walkie-talkie sends out an SOS: Heavy firing. We are all injured. Need help. Please send reinforcements.” Date traded fire with the gunmen until midnight. He was hit again, this time by a bullet to his left leg. Khan and Kasab decided to abandon their position. They released a hostage to provide cover, lobbed another grenade, and rushed toward the exit. In their hurry, Kasab dropped his rucksack, which contained several magazines and the satellite phone, but they had made it outside. The gunmen fled through the front entrance and headed north, under cover of darkness, past the stone archways of St. Xavier’s College and down an alley. They ducked into some bushes when they saw the headlights of a Qualis police SUV on patrol coming their way.

Part II of Jason Motlagh’s definitive narrative of the Bombay attacks at VQR here.

In 1969, we were very free. I turned twenty-seven—too old to be a hippie, after having been too young to pull off being a beatnik—and was so free as to be practically useless, writing just enough to finance days abed in a tiny Sullivan Street apartment, where I convalesced from many drugs, a broken marriage, and other ills of frenetic years on the downtown poetry and art scenes. I almost roused myself to attend Woodstock. Nixon became President. Vietnam churned on. Tidings of the Manson family and the Weathermen intensified a sense of concatenating disaster. Black Power, nascent feminism, and Stonewall discomfited straight white guys like me. (Being on the side of the angels is hard when the angels are mad at you.) In the art world, “New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970,” which opened in 1969, at the Metropolitan Museum, and was curated by the owlish hipster Henry Geldzahler, summarized swiftly receding glories. Philip Guston, whose hypersensitive abstractions I had revered, was painting R. Crumb-like goofball imagery, for which it would take me more than a decade to forgive him. After a psychedelic efflorescence, color died. This I’ve confirmed on visits to “1969,” a huge show of works from the Museum of Modern Art’s collections, at P.S. 1, the museum’s affiliate in Long Island City. A grayer affair, in mood as in hue, cannot be imagined. It vivifies a reign of asceticism that followed upon our surfeit of freedom. Spiritual hair shirts were in fashion.

more from Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker here.

‘To write,’ Barthes suggested in Criticism and Truth (1966), ‘is to engage in a difficult relationship with our own language.’ This is not exactly Cole Porter’s tone, but Barthes liked difficulty, talked about the work and the pleasure of writing in the same breath. Of course, our relationships with language change over time, and it has often seemed as if there were two Roland Barthes, early and late, with not much in between. One was theoretical, analytic, systematic and everyone’s favourite structuralist. The other was impressionistic, allusive and anecdotal, a writer rather than a thinker. The first was the author of Elements of Semiology (1965), The Fashion System (1967) and many essays; the second the author of all the later, more discursive, more autobiographical works, like A Lover’s Discourse (1977) and Camera Lucida (1980). Fans of the first, theoretical Barthes tend not to be too keen on the later, looser model; and they often think the decline set in soon after S/Z (1970), and was especially noticeable in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975). This last work was a kind of critical and publishing joke. Barthes’s second book (after Writing Degree Zero, 1953) was a study of the historian Michelet in a series called Ecrivains de toujours, timeless writers. Because the books contained large selections from the authors’ own texts, they were called Michelet (for example) par lui-même, or in his own words. Barthes was the first living writer to appear in the series (the others weren’t so timeless after all), and his book was the first one to be literally by himself – he wrote it, composed a sort of autobiography in photographs and epigrams, rather than making a selection from his earlier published writing. He even reviewed the book in the Quinzaine littéraire.

more from Michael Wood at the LRB here.

From The Guardian:

Fifty years ago, Holcomb, Kansas was devastated by the slaughter of a local family. And then Truman Capote arrived in town .

River Valley farm stands at the end of an earth road leading out of Holcomb, a small town on the western edge of Kansas. You can see its pretty white gabled roof floating above a sea of corn stubble. The house is famous for the elm trees which line the drive, giving it the tranquil air of a French country lane. The trees are in poor shape though, and desperately in need of pruning; their branches, leafless now, protrude at wild angles. There's something else not quite right about the setting. There is a large “stop” sign at the entrance to the road, backed up by a metal barrier and a hand-written poster in red paint proclaiming: “No Trespassing. Private Drive.” The warnings seem belligerent for such a peaceful spot. The explanation for these warnings lies about half a mile away in Holcomb's local park. A memorial plaque was unveiled there two months ago in honour of the former occupants of River Valley farm: the Clutter family, who lived in that house at the end of the elm drive until one tragic night half a century ago. The plaque carries a lengthy eulogy to the family, recording the many accomplishments of the father, Herb Clutter, and telling us that the family's leisure activities included “entertaining friends, enjoying picnics in the summer and participating in school and church events”.

Towards the end of the inscription it says that Herb, his wife Bonnie, and two of his four children Nancy and Kenyon, “were killed November 15 1959 by intruders who entered their home with the intent of robbery”. That is a very minimalist way of describing a multiple murder that devastated the town of Holcomb, inspired one of the great books of American 20th-century literature and spawned a stack of Hollywood films on that fateful night exactly 50 years ago this Sunday.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Every living cell, even the simplest bacterium, teems with molecular contraptions that would be the envy of any nanotechnologist. As they incessantly shake or spin or crawl around the cell, these machines cut, paste and copy genetic molecules, shuttle nutrients around or turn them into energy, build and repair cellular membranes, relay mechanical, chemical or electrical messages—the list goes on and on, and new discoveries add to it all the time.

It is virtually impossible to imagine how a cell’s machines, which are mostly protein-based catalysts called enzymes, could have formed spontaneously as life first arose from nonliving matter around 3.7 billion years ago. To be sure, under the right conditions some building blocks of proteins, the amino acids, form easily from simpler chemicals, as Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey of the University of Chicago discovered in pioneering experiments in the 1950s. But going from there to proteins and enzymes is a different matter.

More here.

From the Washington Post:

Question: The Vatican is making it easier for Anglicans — priests, members and parishes — to convert to Catholicism. Some say this is further recognition of the substantial overlap in faith, doctrine and spirituality between the Catholic and Anglican traditions; others see it as poaching that could further divide the Anglican Communion. What do you think?

Richard Dawkins: What major institution most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world? In a field of stiff competition, the Roman Catholic Church is surely up there among the leaders. The Anglican church has at least a few shreds of decency, traces of kindness and humanity with which Jesus himself might have connected, however tenuously: a generosity of spirit, of respect for women, and of Christ-like compassion for the less fortunate. The Anglican church does not cleave to the dotty idea that a priest, by blessing bread and wine, can transform it literally into a cannibal feast; nor to the nastier idea that possession of testicles is an essential qualification to perform the rite. It does not send its missionaries out to tell deliberate lies to AIDS-weakened Africans, about the alleged ineffectiveness of condoms in protecting against HIV. Whether one agrees with him or not, there is a saintly quality in the Archbishop of Canterbury, a benignity of countenance, a well-meaning sincerity. How does Pope Ratzinger measure up? The comparison is almost embarrassing.

More here.

To get a clear view of infrared emissions from celestial objects, the Spitzer Space Telescope has been cryogenically cooled—and what sights it has seen.

Michael Werner in American Scientist:

In astrophysical observations, more is more—imaging across multiple wavelengths leads to richer information. One electromagnetic band in which most celestial bodies radiate is the infrared: Objects ranging in location from the chilly fringes of our Solar System to the dust-enshrouded nuclei of distant galaxies radiate entirely or predominantly in this band. Thus, astrophysicists require good visualization of these wavelengths. The problem, however, is that Earth is a very hostile environment for infrared exploration of space, as the atmosphere also emits in the infrared spectrum and additionally absorbs much of the incoming signal. Even heat produced by a telescope itself can degrade its own clarity.

Starting at the end of the 1950s, a number of pioneering groups confronted this challenge and carried out increasingly exciting infrared investigations from ground-based, airborne and balloon-borne observatories. This work continues in parallel with space-based exploration; infrared capabilities form an integral component of current and planned ground-based telescopes with apertures of 10 to 30 meters in diameter.

But the best solution is to send into space a telescope that’s cooled by liquid helium to temperatures just a few degrees above absolute zero. NASA’s Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) was proposed in the early 1970s and finally launched in August 2003. It was renamed the Spitzer Space Telescope in honor of the late Lyman Spitzer, Jr., an astrophysicist who was one of the first to propose the idea of placing a large telescope in space, and was also the driving force behind the Hubble Space Telescope.

More here.

From the BBC:

For those drinking little – less than a shot of vodka a day for instance – the risk was reduced by 35%. And for those who drank anything from three shots to more than 11 shots each day, the risk worked out an average of 50% less.

The same benefits were not seen in women, who suffer fewer heart problems than men to start with. Researchers speculated this difference could be down to the fact that women process alcohol differently, and that female hormones protect against the disease in younger age groups.

The type of alcohol drunk did not seem to make a difference, but protection was greater for those drinking moderate to high amounts of varied drinks.

The exact mechanisms are as yet unclear, but it is known that alcohol helps to raise high-density lipoproteins, sometimes known as good cholesterol, which helps stop so-called bad cholesterol from building up in the arteries.

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein on the Sarah Palin Newsweek cover picture:

Newsweek used this photograph of Sarah Palin as this week's cover shot.

The headline reads, “How do you solve a problem like Sarah? She's bad news for the GOP–and for everybody else, too.”

It's a damned good question, and I couldn't think of a better image to make the point.

Palin posed for this picture as part of a photo essay captioned Governor Palin, The Runner, which ran in the August issue of Runner's World. When I saw this image in its original context, I was appalled that a sitting governor would pose for a shot like this; or this stretching shot that puts the visual center of gravity squarely on her crotch.

Maybe Palin didn't realize that the photographer, Brian Adams, was depicting her this way. If so, he totally fucked her over. But I think she was on board with the concept. If Palin had assailed Runner's World for making fun of her, I might now take her complaint about Newsweek seriously. She liked the Runner's World spread, though. She thought it was appropriate.

Audios of four talks–by Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, and Cornel West–over at the Immanent Frame:

Four of the world’s leading public intellectuals came together on Thursday, October 22 in the historic Great Hall at Cooper Union to discuss “Rethinking Secularism.” In an electrifying symposium convened by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Social Science Research Council and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West gave powerful accounts of religion in the public sphere.

Dipesh Chakrabarty in Eurozine:

The current planetary crisis of climate change or global warming elicits a variety of responses in individuals, groups, and governments, ranging from denial, disconnect, and indifference to a spirit of engagement and activism of varying kinds and degrees. These responses saturate our sense of the now. Alan Weisman’s best-selling book The World without Us suggests a thought experiment as a way of experiencing our present: “Suppose that the worst has happened. Human extinction is a fait accompli. […] Picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. […] Might we have left some faint, enduring mark on the universe? […] Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?”[1] I am drawn to Weisman’s experiment as it tellingly demonstrates how the current crisis can precipitate a sense of the present that disconnects the future from the past by putting such a future beyond the grasp of historical sensibility. The discipline of history exists on the assumption that our past, present, and future are connected by a certain continuity of human experience. We normally envisage the future with the help of the same faculty that allows us to picture the past. Weisman’s thought experiment illustrates the historicist paradox that inhabits contemporary moods of anxiety and concern about the finitude of humanity. To go along with Weisman’s experiment, we have to insert ourselves into a future “without us” in order to be able to visualize it. Thus, our usual historical practices for visualizing times, past and future, times inaccessible to us personally – the exercise of historical understanding – are thrown into a deep contradiction and confusion. Weisman’s experiment indicates how such confusion follows from our contemporary sense of the present insofar as that present gives rise to concerns about our future. Our historical sense of the present, in Weisman’s version, has thus become deeply destructive of our general sense of history.

I will return to Weisman’s experiment in the last part of this essay. There is much in the debate on climate change that should be of interest to those involved in contemporary discussions about history. For as the idea gains ground that the grave environmental risks of global warming have to do with excessive accumulation in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases produced mainly through the burning of fossil fuel and the industrialized use of animal stock by human beings, certain scientific propositions have come into circulation in the public domain that have profound, even transformative, implications for how we think about human history or about what the historian C. A. Bayly recently called “the birth of the modern world”.

Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver and Daniel Lee in the NYT:

We’ve crunched some poll numbers in order to relate senators’ positions on the bill to public opinion in their home states. First, we rated each of the 100 senators from 1 to 5, based on their public statements and their committee votes on the health care initiative, with 1 meaning completely opposed (like Jim DeMint of South Carolina) and 5 meaning completely supporting the bill (like Barbara Boxer of California).

We then compared these scores against several statistical indicators that would presumably affect lawmakers’ positions, including their party affiliations and the rate of uninsurance in their home states. We also looked at polling data from the National Annenberg Election Surveys, which asked voters in each state: “Providing health insurance for people who do not already have it — should the federal government spend more on it, the same as now, less, or no money at all?” (The Annenberg data are from 2000 and 2004; 2008 data have yet to be released.)

But the relationship between state-level opinion and senators’ positions on health care disappears once we introduce another variable — Mr. Obama’s margin of victory in each state in 2008. This holds whether or not we take into account a senator’s political party.

For instance, Senator Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat who has been a less-than-strong supporter of the present health care bill, recently told The Times, “I am responsible to the people of Arkansas, and that is where I will take my direction.” But where does she look for her cue? Hers is a poor state whose voters support health care subsidies six percentage points more than the national average. On the other hand, Mr. Obama got just 40 percent of the vote there.

Ed Cummings in More Intelligent Life:

One evening this summer, in our final term at Cambridge, my roommate Katie threw a party. Our set was in a 17th-century attic, and its sloping ceilings framed a gorgeous view: a panorama taking in King’s College Chapel, the billiard-table lawns of the backs and the stately river. In that room you felt the mass of student life that had passed before you: even the doorframe had a musty glamour. Yet on this occasion I had no interest in joining the bright young things drinking vodka from coffee mugs. This wasn’t any virtue on my part. It was down to a drug: modafinil, an aid to concentration. I sat at my desk, head in an essay. I scarcely noticed the party until I looked up and saw it had finished. I had finished the essay too: 2,000 words in an hour and a half.

I was an ordinary student, but the drug let me feel intermittently extraordinary. Before, I would labour languidly over essays. Now, I would concentrate until they were done. I’m sure it improved my results. And I wasn’t alone: chemical cognitive enhancement is becom ing part of student life.

Modafinil was never meant for people like me. It was invented to stop narcoleptics falling asleep, then adapted to let soldiers stay up all night. But gradually it was noticed that as well as increasing wakefulness, the drug imp roved concentration. I first sought my own hit after realising that four or five of my friends were using it to help them revise. With finals looming, they wanted to boost their concentration and fight the urge to slack off. The modern student wages a constant battle against the forces of distraction, the flit from screen to screen. Though technologically literate, we find it hard to dwell on any idea for very long. My friends had found an antidote.

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) hummed with the foot traffic of late commuters. Under hulking steel rafters, held over from the British colonial era, the PA announcer issued final calls for departing suburban trains as they lurched away one after the next, packed with passengers. Long-distance travelers, mostly the poor North Indian migrants who flock to the city by the tens of thousands, took up benches and spots on the concrete floor, resting on sheets of newsprint with their piles of luggage. Fongen Fernandes, the spry fifty-three-year-old manager of the upper level of the Re-Fresh snack bar with its tall glass panels overlooking the platforms, was talking to a graphic designer. Fernandes stood admiring the designer’s digital handiwork on a laptop open at a table in the far corner of the restaurant, when he felt sand-like debris sprinkle the top of his head. “What’s this?” he said to himself. He wiped his smooth pate a couple times and continued talking, unaware that below two young men had emerged from a bathroom abutting Platform 13 and begun spraying the crowd with gunfire, unaware that a high-velocity bullet shot from less than thirty yards away had missed him by inches and lodged in the wall over his shoulder. He bid the designer farewell and was halfway down the stairs when another series of rounds cracked against the wall and showered sparks into the air. A grenade exploded on the platform.

more from the incredible piece by Jason Motlagh at VQR here.

It was only while serving in an army barracks in Bangalore that the young Winston Churchill began reading books. At the comparatively late age of twenty-two he tells us in My Early Life, the desire for learning came upon him. He had always liked history at school and decided to begin with Gibbon; from there he went on to Macaulay. He already knew by heart (as so many children of his generation did) the Lays of Ancient Rome. He progressed to philosophy, beginning with Plato’s Republic and ending with Schopenhauer and Darwin’s Origin of Species. For Churchill, this was a preparation for life. He learned, for example, for the first time, that “ethics” did not mean “playing the game”, or esprit de corps; he learned that it concerned not just knowing the things you ought to know, but also the way you ought to do them. His greatest discovery was the “Socratic method” which was “apparently a way of giving your friend his head in an argument and progging him into a pit by cunning questions”. Like the young Winston, Patrick Hennessey also found himself fighting in Afghanistan.

more from Christopher Coker at the TLS here.

From Letters of Note:

In December of 1944, whilst behind enemy lines during the Rhineland Campaign, Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by Wehrmacht troops and subsequently became a prisoner of war. A month later, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs reached a Dresden work camp where they were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). The next month – February – the subterranean nature of the prison saved their lives during the highly controversial and devastating bombing of Dresden, the aftermath of which Vonnegut and the remaining survivors helped to clear up.

Vonnegut released the book Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.

Below is a letter he wrote to his family that May from a repatriation camp, in which he informs them of his capture and survival. Transcript follows.

More here.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

In the fiction category, the award went to Irish author Colum McCann for “Let the Great World Spin,” his novel focusing on the lives of various New Yorkers on the day in 1974 when French trapeze artist Phillip Petit walked a tight rope between the World Trade Center towers. McCann dedicated his award to recently deceased “Angela’s Ashes” author Frank McCourt saying, “I think he’s dancing upstairs.”

The nonfiction winner was T.J. Stiles for “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” who reminded the audience as he accepted the award that “the book lies at the heart of all of our culture.” The award for poetry went to Brown University professor Keith Waldrop for his book of recent verse, “Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy.” For Waldrop, the award was a long time coming – he was previously nominated for a National Book Award 40 years ago, but did not win at that time. Even last night Waldrop took the casual approach. His wife – Rosemarie Waldrop, with whom he co-edits Burning Deck Press – accompanied him from Providence to New York but did not attend the award ceremony, opting instead for the new Philip Glass opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “I almost went to the opera myself,” Waldrop confessed. In the category of children’s books the award went to Phillip Hoose for “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” a biography of “the first Rosa Parks,” a Montgomery, Ala., teenager who refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus nine months before Rosa Parks became famous for the same act. Colvin – who had been almost forgotten by history before Hoose’s book revived awareness of her story – appeared on stage with Hoose as he claimed the award, waving and smiling to the crowd.

Earlier in the evening, Joanne Woodward had been on hand to present a the 2009 medal for distinguished contribution to Gore Vidal.

More here.

Galileo Galilei

Comes to knock and knock again
At a small secluded doorway
In an ordinary brain.

Into light the world is turning,
And the clocks are set for six;
And the chimney pots are smoking,
And the golden candlesticks.

Apple trees are bent and breaking,
And the heat is not the sun’s;
And the Minotaur is waking,
And the streets are cattle runs.
|
Galileo Galilei,
In a flowing, scarlet robe,
While the stars go down the river
With the turning, turning globe,

Kneels before the black Madonna
And the angels cluster round
With grave, uplifted faces
Which reflect the shaken ground

And the orchard which is burning,
And the hills which take the light;
And the candles which have melted
On the altars of the night.

Galileo Galilei
Comes to knock and knock again
At a small secluded doorway
In an ordinary brain.

by William Jay Smith
from Poet’s Choice; Time Books, 1962