As Libyan rebels tried desperately to hold off Colonel Muammer Gaddafi’s forces in March last year in the town of Zawiya, 50km west of Tripoli, one opposition supporter had a simple question for the Sky News special correspondent Alex Crawford: “How can we do this on our own?” Within two weeks, his rhetorical plea – quoted in Crawford’s book, Colonel Gaddafi’s Hat – was moot. Following a UN Security Council resolution authorising “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians, Nato warplanes had begun a bombardment of Gaddafi’s forces that over the next six months would chip away at the regime until a path was clear for the rebels to take Tripoli. I and other journalists saw the extraordinary bravery of many Libyans opposed to the colonel, from the long-persecuted Amazigh, or Berber, people battling out from their western mountain redoubt, to the Tripoli dissidents who tried to protest even as pick-ups packed with soldiers roamed the streets. But in the end they did need outside help in unseating an adversary who proved much more resilient than the leaders toppled in a matter of weeks in Libya’s neighbours Tunisia and Egypt.

more from Michael Peel at the FT here.

In “Homage to Catalonia,” his memoir of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell remarks that Francisco Franco’s military uprising against Spain’s elected government “was an attempt not so much to impose fascism as to restore feudalism.” Paul Preston’s magisterial account of the bloodshed of that era bears this out. Fascism may belong to the 20th century, but Franco’s grab for power evokes earlier times: the parading soldiers who flourished enemy ears and noses on their bayonets, the mass public executions carried out in bullrings or with band music and onlookers dancing in the victims’ blood. One of Franco’s top aides talked of democratically chosen politicians as “cloven-hoofed beasts,” and anything that smacked of modernity — Rotary Clubs, Montessori schools — seemed to draw the regime’s violent wrath. Echoing the Inquisition, Franco ordered particularly despised foes put to death with the garrote, in which the executioner tightens an iron collar around a person’s neck.

more from Adam Hochschild at the NY Times here.

Sasha Weiss in The New Yorker:

In 1993, Art Spiegelman and Maurice Sendak spent a rambling day at the older artist’s house in Connecticut. What emerged from their conversation—along with an ongoing and affectionate friendship—was the idea for a collaborative comic strip (reproduced above, click to expand) about the nature of children’s fears, that ran in The New Yorker in the September 27, 1993 issue. Working in Spiegelman’s studio in New York some weeks later, they sat side by side while Spiegelman drew on one half of a panel and Sendak worked on the other. I spoke with Spiegelman about his encounters with the creator of the Wild Things.

How did you come to know Maurice?

I came to know of Maurice’s big interest in comics through a guy named Woody Gelman, a very significant collector of old paper when old paper wasn’t really being collected, who had gathered together all the Little Nemo Sunday pages when nobody knew what they were. Woody was in touch with Maurice, who was very excited about them. They grew into being “In the Night Kitchen.” And so I would get news of Sendak way before I ever met him. This was in the late sixties. I am a little bit too old to have grown up with his kid’s books, but I saw them and was really jazzed by what I saw—a kindred spirit in the sense of somebody who was making kid’s books, drawings, but that had a comics inflection somehow.

More here.

After yesterday’s bittersweetly funny Sendak remembrance, a trip to his more serious and obscure past: In 2003, Sendak collaborated with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner on Brundibar—a WWII children’s opera, originally written by Czech composer Hans Krása, which the duo adapted into a book illustrated by Sendak and an opera for which Sendak designed the sets and costumes. But Sendak’s fascination with the opera dated back some three decades, to the 1970s, when he began collaborating with printmaker Kenneth Tyler while working on sets and costumes for Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. These operas inspired him to create a wealth of sketches, drawings, and watercolors. Some of them appeared in his beloved book Nutcracker and others were printed at Tyler Graphics between 1977 and 1984, and again in 2002, employing lithography and intaglio processes.

more from Maria Popova at The Atlantic here.

Anthony Powell, in wise-facetious mood, once quoted an English publisher on how to write “a good Jewish novel”: write a good novel, then change all the names to Jewish ones. The joke came to mind while I was reading Hilary Mantel’s “Bring Up the Bodies” (Holt). Both this new book and its predecessor, “Wolf Hall,” are mysteriously successful historical novels, a somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness. One of the reasons for this literary success is that Mantel seems to have written a very good modern novel, then changed all her fictional names to English historical figures of the fifteen-twenties and thirties. Where much historical fiction gets entangled in the simulation of historical authenticity, Mantel bypasses those knots of concoction, and proceeds as if authenticity were magic rather than a science. She knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case. In effect, she proceeds as if the past five hundred years were a relatively trivial interval in the annals of human motivation.

more from James Wood at The New Yorker here.

An astonishing concept has entered mainstream cosmological thought: physical reality could be hugely more extensive than the patch of space and time traditionally called “the universe.” We’ve learnt that we live in a solar system that is just one planetary system among billions, in one galaxy among billions. But there are signs that a further Copernican demotion confronts us. The entire panorama that astronomers can observe could be a tiny part of the aftermath of our Big Bang, which is itself just one bang among a potentially infinite ensemble. In this grander perspective, what we’ve traditionally called the laws of nature may be no more than parochial bylaws—local manifestations of “bedrock” laws that must be sought at a still deeper level. Astronomers might seem the most helpless of all scientists. They can’t do experiments on stars and galaxies, and human lives are far too short for us to watch most cosmic objects evolve. But there are some compensating advantages. There are huge numbers of objects in the sky, and one can infer the life-cycle of stars, just as one can infer how trees have grown and will die from one day’s wandering in a forest.

more from Martin Rees at Prospect Magazine here.

Alix Spiegel at NPR:

Pennebaker has counted words to better understand lots of things. He's looked at lying, at leadership, at who will recover from trauma.

But some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status.

“It's amazingly simple,” Pennebaker says, “Listen to the relative use of the word “I.”

What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word “I” less.

To demonstrate this Pennebaker pointed to some of his own email, a batch written long before he began studying status.

First he shares an email written by one of his undergraduate students, a woman named Pam:

Dear Dr. Pennebaker:

I was part of your Introductory Psychology class last semester. I have enjoyed your lectures and I'velearned so much. I received an email from you about doing some research with you. Would there be a time for me to come by and talk about this?

Pam

Now consider Pennebaker's response:

Dear Pam –

This would be great. This week isn't good because of a trip. How about next Tuesday between 9 and 10:30. It will be good to see you.

Jamie Pennebaker

Pam, the lowly undergraduate used “I” many times, while Pennebaker didn't use it at all.

More here.

Sam Harris in his blog:

Imagine that you work for the TSA and are executing a hand search of a traveler’s bag. He is a young man in his twenties and seems nervous. You notice that he is carrying a hardcover copy ofThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You pick up the book and ask him if he likes it. He now appears even more nervous than before. You notice something odd about the book—the dust jacket doesn’t seem to fit. You remove it and find a different book underneath. How do you feel about this traveler’s demeanor, and the likelihood of his being a terrorist, if the book is:

A. The Qur’an (in Arabic)

B. The Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide

C. Overcoming Impotence: A Leading Urologist Tells You Everything You Need to Know

D. Dianetics

If you care more about A than B, C, or D, as I think you should, you are guilty of religious profiling (and calling it “behavioral profiling” doesn’t change this fact).

The funny thing about my “racism” is that I would probably be more concerned if the young man in this example were light-skinned, like me, than Middle Eastern. Why? Because he would have had to make a great effort to learn Arabic. Is there anything intrinsically sinister about learning Arabic? No. I wish I knew Arabic. But it is one more detail that fits the profile of someone who is deeply committed to the worldview of Islam and disposed to conceal that fact. Are all such people terrorists? Of course not. But every person who attempts to blow himself up on an airplane, now or in the foreseeable future, is likely to come from this group. Of course, if that changes, we should alter our view of security accordingly. If the Ku Klux Klan were to declare a broader war on civilization and begin a campaign of suicide bombings, we would have to keep an eye on that profile too (and being nonwhite or Jewish would help smooth your path through security).

More here. And a response by security expert Bruce Schneier:

The right way to look at security is in terms of cost-benefit trade-offs. If adding profiling to airport checkpoints allowed us to detect more threats at a lower cost, then we should implement it. If it didn’t, we’d be foolish to do so. Sometimes profiling works. Consider a sheep in a meadow, happily munching on grass. When he spies a wolf, he’s going to judge that individual wolf based on a bunch of assumptions related to the past behavior of its species. In short, that sheep is going to profile…and then run away. This makes perfect sense, and is why evolution produced sheep—and other animals—that react this way. But this sort of profiling doesn’t work with humans at airports, for several reasons.

First, in the sheep’s case the profile is accurate, in that all wolves are out to eat sheep. Maybe a particular wolf isn’t hungry at the moment, but enough wolves are hungry enough of the time to justify the occasional false alarm. However, it isn’t true that almost all Muslims are out to blow up airplanes. In fact, almost none of them are. Post 9/11, we’ve had 2 Muslim terrorists on U.S airplanes: the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber. If you assume 0.8% (that’s one estimate of the percentage of Muslim Americans) of the 630 million annual airplane fliers are Muslim and triple it to account for others who look Semitic, then the chances any profiled flier will be a Muslim terrorist is 1 in 80 million. Add the 19 9/11 terrorists—arguably a singular event—that number drops to 1 in 8 million. Either way, because the number of actual terrorists is so low, almost everyone selected by the profile will be innocent. This is called the “base rate fallacy,” and dooms any type of broad terrorist profiling, including the TSA’s behavioral profiling.

More here.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Anna Quindlen — whose new memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, was published by Random House last week — is a woman of many accomplishments. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Beloved novelist. Sought-after public speaker. The only author to ever have books on The New York Times' fiction, nonfiction, and self-help bestseller lists. She's also my mother, which she'd tell you is her greatest accomplishment (along with being the mother of my younger siblings, Chris and Maria). I thought, since her new book is filled with reflections on motherhood and family, who better to ask the right questions than someone who's been around for much of the journey her memoir describes? So I asked if I could interview her about the book and the stories behind it, and she said yes (of course). But as we sat down to talk, she was the one with the first question: “Isn't this so weird for you? I mean, did you ever imagine that someday we'd be sitting here at the dining room table, talking about my life?” In truth, the experience was a little surreal — and nerve-wracking. We've had plenty of conversations about her work before, but this was different; I felt the pressure any interviewer feels, to ask the right questions to get the interviewee talking. But it turned out to be so much fun that we both quickly forgot about the unusual occasion and the tape recorder between us. I thought we'd start with the title because I know you had a lot of difficulty arriving at a title for this book. I was hoping you could talk about the different titles you went through prior to Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake.

Anna Quindlen: I'm not sure that any one title had traction for more than an hour when I first started writing this memoir. The problem is that the book is about so many different things. About motherhood, about friendship, about how we grow older, about how we care for ourselves and our families while we grow older. There wasn't one title that covered the waterfront. And what I realized at a certain point was that I wanted a title that communicated, for lack of a better word, the joyfulness of the book. The exuberance. I was walking across town to have dinner with my friend, the mystery writer Linda Fairstein, and Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake just popped into my head. Full bore. I immediately e-mailed it to my agent. She loved it. She forwarded it to my editor. She loved it. We all felt that it really captured something about the book. It captured the age aspect, but also the joyfulness. And that was the duality that we really wanted to get front and center.

More here.

Ayesha Jalal in The Hindu:

Saadat Hasan Manto, whose birth centenary is being celebrated in Pakistan and India today, once remarked that any attempt to fathom the murderous hatred that erupted with such devastating effect at the time of the British retreat from the subcontinent had to begin with an exploration of human nature itself.

For the master of the Urdu short story this was not a value judgment. It was a statement of what he had come to believe after keen observation and extended introspection. Shaken by the repercussions of the decision to break up the unity of the subcontinent, Manto wondered if people who only recently were friends, neighbours and compatriots had lost all sense of their humanity. He too was a human being, ‘the same human being who raped mankind, who indulged in killing' and had ‘all those weaknesses and qualities that other human beings have.' Yet human depravity, however pervasive and deplorable, could not kill all sense of humanity. With faith in that kind of humanity, Manto wrote riveting short stories about the human tragedy of 1947 that are internationally acknowledged for representing the plight of displaced and terrorised humanity with exemplary impartiality and empathy.

Manto's partition stories are a must read for anyone interested in the personal dimensions of India's division and the creation of Pakistan. Pieced together from close observations of the experiences of ordinary people at the moment of a traumatic rupture, his stories are not only unsurpassable in literary quality but records of rare historical significance. Unlike journalistic and partisan accounts of those unsettled times, Manto's transcended the limitations of the communitarian narratives underpinning the nationalist self-projections of both Pakistan and India. He did not create demons out of other communities to try and absolve himself of responsibility for the moral crisis posed by the violence of partition.

More here.

From Nature:

Researchers have found a set of gene mutations that seem to play a part in some cases of skin cancer. Cancer geneticist Michael Berger of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of 25 melanoma tumours that had been donated by patients and compared them to the patients' normal cells. They found that one gene, PREX2, was mutated in 11 of the 25 tumour samples, and that genetic rearrangements occurred near this gene in nine patients. PREX2 produces a protein that curtails the action of another protein called PTEN, which is involved in preventing cancer development.

Berger and his colleagues also found potentially damaging PREX2 mutations in 14% of 107 tumours that were not part of the initial study. And when they transplanted human skin cells containing PREX2 mutations into mice that had been engineered to develop skin cancer, four of the six different PREX2 mutations accelerated development of the tumours in mice. This led the researchers to suggest that PREX2 might have a similar role in human skin cancers. Their work is published in Nature today¹. The team also confirmed some findings from earlier studies², including the effect that sun exposure can have on the mutation rate of tumour DNA. Tumours from areas of the body that are not frequently exposed to sunlight had around 3 to 14 mutations every million base pairs, whereas one patient who was known to have had high levels of sun exposure had 111 mutations every million base pairs.

More here.

Charles Petersen in n+1:

In March 2008, the New York Public Library announced a $100 million gift from private equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman and a sweeping plan to radically remake its landmark main building on 42nd Street. Six months later, Lehman Brothers collapsed; the plan, to no one’s surprise, was put on hold. Now, the administration has announced that the renovation, its budget increased from $250 to $350 million, is back on track. The proposed designs developed by British architect Norman Foster have not yet been made public, but the basic scheme remains the same: to tear out the steel stacks that occupy almost half of the main building—and that literally hold up the famed Rose Reading Room on the top floor—and replace them with a new circulating library. This library will offer plenty of books, DVDs, and other materials, which any patron will be allowed to take out of the building, unlike the current research collection. The plan will be financed through the sale of two of the library’s nearby branches—the Mid-Manhattan Library across the street and the Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL) at Madison and 34th—and through a $150 million grant from the City of New York. The new super-library will also be designed for a time when the idea of physically circulating books becomes a thing of the past and practically all library “materials” will be available exclusively through digital devices.

That, however, is in the future. What the present will bring is the removal of the majority of the library’s outstanding collection of research-level books, which for most of the past century have rarely if ever been allowed out of the building. These books will be moved to a storage facility in Princeton, New Jersey. Some will remain in the stacks beneath Bryant Park, but the rest of the books in the library’s core collection will be available only by putting in a request and waiting for them to be brought back to New York.

When the ancient geographer Strabo described the native inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula, he listed – with a predictable combination of relish, horror and exaggeration – all kinds of aspects of their weird barbarity. Some of the Spanish tribesmen, he insisted, stored vintage urine in cisterns and then bathed in it, or used it to clean their teeth. Others dressed their women up with iron rods around their necks rather than jewellery. Others, still stranger, appeared to have no gods. No less remarkable, for Strabo, was the bafflement some of these poor Spaniards felt at the day-to-day habits of their new Roman allies or conquerors. One group of tribesmen, he explained, visiting a Roman camp and seeing some generals taking a stroll, “walking up and down the road”, thought they were “mad and tried to take them back into their tents”, either to sit down and rest, or get up and fight. Despite Strabo’s patronizing tone, it’s one of those rare occasions where we can catch a glimpse of the barbarian point of view on the Romans. The Spaniards presumably thought that walking was something that got a person from A to B (or from tent to battleground). What on earth then were these Roman generals doing as they ambled around, chatting, but not actually going anywhere?

more from Mary Beard at the TLS here.

It’s been 450 years since Pieter Breugel the Elder painted the famous “Dulle Griet,” and still no one can agree what the painting is about. In the center of the mad surreal Boschian landscape is Dulle Griet — in English, “Mad Meg” — a homely peasant woman from Flemish folklore, wearing the armor of a soldier. In her left hand she carries a cloth bag and a couple of baskets filled to spilling with kitchen items; tucked under her armpit is a small chest. In her free hand, she holds a long sword pointed at the mouth of Hell. All around Dulle Griet, hellfires burn through the landscape, a city in ruin. There is an infestation of egg-shaped little creatures. One such creature is dancing merrily on a burning rooftop in the background. In front of Dulle Griet is another egg-shaped creature with, I believe, a spoon inserted handle-first into its anus, which is also, possibly, its mouth. Behind Dulle Griet, an army of peasant women beat away invaders (demons? soldiers?). There’s a story here, with a moral. There’s always a moral amidst hellfire. But what is it?

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

From The New York Times:

It has always taken strong national leadership to expand equal rights in this country, and it has long been obvious that marriage rights are no exception. President Obama offered some of that leadership on Wednesday. “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with ABC News that the White House arranged for the purpose of giving Mr. Obama a forum to say just that. With those 10 words, Mr. Obama finally stopped temporizing and “evolving” his position on same-sex marriage and took the moral high ground on what may be the great civil rights struggle of our time. His words will not end the bitter fight over marriage rights, which we fear will continue for years to come. But they were of great symbolic value, and perhaps more. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted, no expansion of rights embraced by a president has failed to become the law of the land.

This is a president and a White House that has not always been unwavering in taking positions of principle, including on this issue. Mr. Obama’s statement followed days of unseemly equivocation by the White House after Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. announced his support for same-sex marriage on Sunday. It also came one day after North Carolina voters approved a constitutional amendment forbidding same-sex marriage and civil unions, which threatens all unmarried couples, health coverage for their children and domestic violence laws. Still, the contrast was sharp between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney, who took a hard-line position on Wednesday against same-sex marriage and civil unions with similar rights. He has said he favors a national constitutional amendment enshrining this particular bigotry.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Carnivorous plants can have valuable allies in ants, benefiting from their feces and janitor, bodyguard and cutthroat services, researchers say. The carnivorous pitcher plant Nepenthes bicalcarata dwells in the nutrient-poor peat swamp forests of Borneo. It is not a very effective carnivore by itself — its pitcher-shaped leaves lack the slippery walls and viscous, elastic and strongly corrosive fluid that make those of its relatives such effective deathtraps. However, N. bicalcarata does apparently have unusual support on its side — the ant Camponotus schmitzi. The carnivorous plant has swollen tendrils at the base of each pitcher that serve as homes for the insects, and a food source in the form of nectar secreted on the pitcher rims.

More here.

White Spine

Liar, I thought, kneeling with the others,
how can He love me and hate what I am?
The dome of St. Peter's shone yellowish
gold, like butter and eggs. My God, I prayed
anyhow, as if made in the image
and likeness of Him. Nearby, a handsome
priest looked at me like a stone; I looked back,
not desiring to go it alone.
The college of cardinals wore punitive red.
The white spine waved to me from his white throne.
Being in a place not my own, much less
myself, I climbed out, a beast in a crib.
Somewhere a terrorist rolled a cigarette.
Reason, not faith, would change him.

by Henri Cole
from The Visible Man
Knopf, 1998

Are we governed by unconscious processes? Neuroscience believes so – but isn't the human condition more complicated than that? Two experts offer different views.

David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis in The Guardian:

David Eagleman: It is clear at this point that we are irrevocably tied to the 3lb of strange computational material found within our skulls. The brain is utterly alien to us, and yet our personalities, hopes, fears and aspirations all depend on the integrity of this biological tissue. How do we know this? Because when the brain changes, we change. Our personality, decision-making, risk-aversion, the capacity to see colours or name animals – all these can change, in very specific ways, when the brain is altered by tumours, strokes, drugs, disease or trauma. As much as we like to think about the body and mind living separate existences, the mental is not separable from the physical.

This clarifies some aspects of our existence while deepening the mystery and the awe of others.

For example, take the vast, unconscious, automated processes that run under the hood of conscious awareness. We have discovered that the large majority of the brain's activity takes place at this low level: the conscious part – the “me” that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is only a tiny bit of the operations. This understanding has given us a better understanding of the complex multiplicity that makes a person. A person is not a single entity of a single mind: a human is built of several parts, all of which compete to steer the ship of state. As a consequence, people are nuanced, complicated, contradictory. We act in ways that are sometimes difficult to detect by simple introspection. To know ourselves increasingly requires careful studies of the neural substrate of which we are composed.

More here.

Ken Croswell in Science:

Some people seem born under an unlucky star. But some stars are equally unlucky themselves. Astronomers have spotted a star in another galaxy plunging toward a giant black hole and being ripped to shreds, sparking a flare so brilliant that observers detected it from a distance of 2.1 billion light-years. By watching the flare brighten and fade, scientists have achieved the unprecedented feat of reconstructing the life story of the doomed sun.

Giant black holes occupy the centers of most large galaxies, including our own, whose central black hole is 4 million times as massive as the sun and swallows a star once every 10,000 to 100,000 years. Astronomers have recently seen black holes in several other galaxies rip stars apart. But the new drama is unique. “This is the first time where we're really seeing one of these events from start to finish,” says astronomer Suvi Gezari of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “What was so spectacular was the fact that we actually could figure out what type of star was disrupted.”

Astronomers first picked up a signal from the constellation Draco in May 2010, when the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii spotted a flare at visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The scientists calculate that the black hole's gravity had torn the star apart a month earlier by pulling harder on one side of the star than the other. As stellar debris funneled into the black hole, gravity and friction roasted the star's remains until they emitted ultraviolet radiation, which NASA's GALEX satellite detected in June. The flare peaked in July 2010, outshining all the stars in the galaxy put together, and then faded, but was still aglow a year later.

More here.