Philip Ball in Prospect:

There’s never been a better time to be a quantum physicist. The foundations of quantum theory were laid a century ago, but the subject is currently enjoying a renaissance. Modern experimental techniques make it possible to probe fundamental questions that were left hanging by the subject’s originators, such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg. Now, we are not only grappling with the supposed weirdness of the quantum world, but also putting its paradoxical principles to practical use.

This is reflected in the fact that three physics Nobel prizes have been awarded since 1997 in the field of quantum optics, the most recent going this week to Serge Haroche of the Collège de France and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and David Wineland of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado. It’s “quantum” because the work of these two scientists is concerned with examining the way atoms and other small particles are governed by quantum rules. And it’s “optics” because they use light to do it. Indeed, light is itself explained by quantum physics, being composed (as Einstein’s Nobel-winning work of 1905 showed) of packets of energy called photons. The word “quantum” was coined by Max Planck in 1900 to describe this discrete “graininess” of the world at the scale of atoms.

More here.

Sarah Morrison in The Independent:

It played unwilling host to one of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq war. Fallujah's homes and businesses were left shattered; hundreds of Iraqi civilians were killed. Its residents changed the name of their “City of Mosques” to “the polluted city” after the United States launched two massive military campaigns eight years ago. Now, one month before the World Health Organisation reveals its view on the legacy of the two battles for the town, a new study reports a “staggering rise” in birth defects among Iraqi children conceived in the aftermath of the war.

High rates of miscarriage, toxic levels of lead and mercury contamination and spiralling numbers of birth defects ranging from congenital heart defects to brain dysfunctions and malformed limbs have been recorded. Even more disturbingly, they appear to be occurring at an increasing rate in children born in Fallujah, about 40 miles west of Baghdad.

There is “compelling evidence” to link the increased numbers of defects and miscarriages to military assaults, says Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, one of the lead authors of the report and an environmental toxicologist at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. Similar defects have been found among children born in Basra after British troops invaded, according to the new research.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Gary Kemp in 3:AM Magazine:

Gary Kemp finds Quine and Davidson awesome and has edgy thoughts about them all the time. He thinks Frege is more Newton than Einstein and refines him. Aesthetics isn’t his primary thing but he’s always interested. He keeps reading Proust and doesn’t think Beckettis a window-dresser. He thinks Quine thinks there’s no issue about realism – which is neither a realist nor an anti-realist position. He is thus sensationally groovacious.

3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Has it been rewarding so far?

Gary Kemp: I think like many people I became what I am before I had any real sense of choosing. At university – the University of Oregon – I was fleeing from my dad (he was an eminent astrophysicist), playing the guitar and being interested in English literature, when I had my first philosophy class, and was hooked. Or second, the first was as a freshman and I had no sense of anything at first (if ever). I don’t know if it’s been rewarding; what would I compare it with? I do feel very fortunate to have a job as an academic philosopher.

3:AM: You’ve written about Frege and his conception of truth. Before we go into details of what you argue, could you say a little about Frege for us here at 3:AM to give us the context? Frege is a hugely important figure but isn’t as well known as, say, Einstein in science, but what he achieved was arguably as important and impressive. So could you say what is at stake in Frege’s work?

GK: As many people have pointed out, Frege was the first to develop rigorously what has since been called a theory of meaning, and truth sits at the centre of his model. And why is a theory of meaning so important? Ultimately I think it isn’t so important, but in certain moods it is not hard to accept that the idea, as has been made very explicit by Michael Dummett, is more fundamental than epistemology or metaphysics. I would say that Frege is more properly compared with Newton than with Einstein, if you had to choose.

An excerpt from Kevin Dutton's The Wisdom of Psychopaths, in Scientific American:

Traits that are common among psychopathic serial killers—a grandiose sense of self-worth, persuasiveness, superficial charm, ruthlessness, lack of remorse and the manipulation of others—are also shared by politicians and world leaders. Individuals, in other words, running not from the police. But for office. Such a profile allows those who present with these traits to do what they like when they like, completely unfazed by the social, moral or legal consequences of their actions.

If you are born under the right star, for example, and have power over the human mind as the moon over the sea, you might order the genocide of 100,000 Kurds and shuffle to the gallows with such arcane recalcitrance as to elicit, from even your harshest detractors, perverse, unspoken deference.

“Do not be afraid, doctor,” said Saddam Hussein on the scaffold, moments before his execution. “This is for men.”

If you are violent and cunning, like the real-life “Hannibal Lecter” Robert Maudsley, you might take a fellow inmate hostage, smash his skull in and sample his brains with a spoon as nonchalantly as if you were downing a soft-boiled egg. (Maudsley, by the way, has been cooped up in solitary confinement for the past 30 years, in a bulletproof cage in the basement of Wakefield Prison in England.)

Maria Popova in Brain Pickings:

As a lover of the intersection of art andscience, I find myself more excited about The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science(public library) than I’ve been about a book in ages. In this gem, as intellectually stimulating as it is visually stunning, creative trifecta Julia Rothman (♥ ♥ ♥ ♥), Jenny Volvovski and Matt Lamothe, better-known as Also Online, invite some of today’s most celebrated artists to create scientific illustrations and charts to accompany short essays about the most fascinating unanswered questions on the minds of contemporary scientists across biology, astrophysics, chemistry, quantum mechanics, anthropology, and more. The questions cover such mind-bending subjects as whether there are more than three dimensions, why we sleep and dream, what causes depression, how long trees live, and why humans are capable of language.

The images, which comes from a mix of well-known titans and promising up-and-comers, including favorites like Lisa Congdon, Gemma Correll, and Jon Klassen, borrow inspiration from antique medical illustrations, vintage science diagrams, and other historical ephemera from periods of explosive scientific curiosity.

Above all, the project is a testament to the idea that ignorance is what drives discovery and wonder is what propels science — a reminder to, as Rilke put it, live the questions and delight in reflecting on the mysteries themselves.

From The Guardian:

'It's all over,” says TC Boyle. “This planet is doomed. In a very short time, we're probably not even going to have culture or art. We're going to be living like we're in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.” In 2000, Boyle published A Friend of the Earth, a novel set in 2025 in a California recently devastated by ecological collapse, where numerous animals have become extinct and rain falls heavily for the majority of the year. “Looking back,” he says, “I should have probably moved the date forward to 2015. We live in a very different world to the one that 19th-century novelists lived in. It's a godless world, without hope.”

Going right back to his astonishingly assured 1982 debut novel, Water Music, in which explorer Mungo Park travels to a pungent west Africa to find the Niger river, Boyle's work has shown a fear and respect for the power of nature. Recently, however, he has seemed more concerned with environmental issues than ever. Again and again in his fiction, man butts up against animal and environment and comes off second best. This was true of Drop City, his 2003 novel about 1970s hippies attempting to live the communal life in Alaska; of the weatherbeaten tales contained in his recent collections After the Plague, Tooth and Claw and Wild Child; and of last year's When the Killing's Done, about conflict between biologists and animal rights protesters. And it's certainly the case in his new book, San Miguel, set on one of the Pacific Channel Islands between the 1880s and 1940s.

More here.

For the man who jumped out in front of the woman with his
arm raised like a machete screaming Abomination! as she
walked the streets of San Francisco holding her lover’s hand
for the first time in public.

Sign Language

There is a woman who goes to sleep
every night wishing she had broken
your sternum reached up inside your
chest momentarily borrowing your
heart to hold before your screaming
face and with her other hand still
clutching her lover’s broke next into
her own sternum plucking next her
own heart dangling them both there
sterling silver sign language for you
tell me what is the difference.

by Nikky Finney
from The World is Round
Innerlight Publishing, 2003

In the Economist (via Jonathan Hopkin):

SALTSJÖBADEN, A CHARMING seaside town on the outskirts of Stockholm, has an iconic place in Swedish economic history. The “Saltsjöbaden Accord”, signed there between unions and employers in 1938, ushered in the consensus system of labour relations that remains a pillar of Sweden’s economic model. Nowadays the town is famous for a different reason. It is one of Stockholm’s fanciest suburbs, and the setting for “Sunny Side”, a popular television comedy that pokes fun at the country’s new rich. In the show, Saltsjöbaden’s yuppy residents fret over how to get their babies into the best nursery. A badly behaved child is threatened with banishment to Fisksätra, a poor enclave a few train stops away, where immigrants from 100 countries cram into dilapidated blocks of flats.

The most equal country in the world is becoming less so. Sweden’s Gini coefficient for disposable income is now 0.24, still a lot lower than the rich-world average of 0.31 but around 25% higher than it was a generation ago. That rise is causing considerable angst in a nation whose self-image is staunchly egalitarian. A leftist group caused a media hubbub earlier this year by organising a “class safari” bus tour of Saltsjöbaden and Fisksätra. Opposition leaders insist that the ruling centre-right party is turning Sweden into America.

Anders Borg, the finance minister, vehemently disagrees. Sweden, he argues, has gone from being a stagnant benefit-based society to a vibrant modern economy with a remarkably small rise in inequality. Its experience, he says, shows that dynamism and egalitarianism do not need to be at odds.

As its title suggests, breasts have a considerable role to play in Mo Yan’s saga of twentieth-century China. Not all are plain large: some are “high”, “arching”, “pert”, “delicate, lovely, perky”, and on occasion improbably mobile, “with slightly upturned nipples as nimble as the mouth of a hedgehog”. One pair is described as a couple of “happy white doves”, others are “like opium flowers or valleys of butterflies”; yet another resembles “a little red-eyed rabbit”. But in whatever unpredictable form they manifest themselves, they are everywhere, prompting, with respect to Mo Yan, the question that John Lewis, the narrator of Kingsley Amis’s novel That Uncertain Feeling, asks himself while contemplating a game of women’s tennis: “Why did I like women’s breasts so much? I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?”.

more from Julia Lovell and other TLS writers on Mo Yan here.

It has been a dozen years since Nigeria’s greatest novelist last published a major work and 29 since he captured so poignantly his country’s oil-fuelled decline into mediocrity and decadence in The Trouble with Nigeria. Now, at the age of 81, Chinua Achebe has broken his silence on the 1967-70 civil war with a first-hand account of the events that brought the post-independence aspirations of elite Nigerians crashing down. Coming as it does when fault lines in Africa’s most populous nation are painfully evident, There Was a Country ought to be essential reading. A new, dynamic generation is bursting from the shackles of the past in what looks like the start of a renaissance for business, politics and the arts. Yet some of the same religious, ethnic and regional tensions that combined to create the conditions for the Biafran war are tearing again at the fabric of the Nigerian federation.

more from William Wallis at the FT here.

My mornings (12 noon +) are agony, and the daily Angst is hell. I look forward each day with the same hopeless ardor that a monk must envision paradise to the time when I’m free of this thing that constricts me, to the time when I’m “liberated” enough to be able to sit down and write 25 consecutive words without fear and trembling. It must be my liver, though it might be the heat—which has been terrible—and withal, no doubt, booze is heavily to blame. Anyway, it can’t last too much longer, for I’ll simply have to throw it all up and become a druggist or something. One thing, Rose is going to have a baby (I hope it’s a baby) next March and that might have the quality of snapping me out of my neurotic antics. It is strange, too, how on the weekends, when we go to see people in L.I. or in Conn., a sheer euphoria takes hold of me. I’m self-analytical enough to realize that my murderous anxiety mornings here in the city is because I’m faced with the ridiculous responsibility of creating a masterpiece, whereas the weekends have me gaily unburdened.

more from Styron and Mailer the NYRB here.

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times:

“Who I Am” is an earnest, tortured, searching book — by turns eloquent and long-winded, revealing and oddly elliptical. In it Mr. Townshend, the guitarist and songwriter for the Who, gives an account of his life as intimate and as painful as a therapy session, while chronicling the history of the band as it took shape in the Mod scene in 1960s London and became the very embodiment of adolescent rebellion and loud, anarchic rock ’n’ roll.

Mr. Townshend’s self-portrait is raw and unsparing. He tells us about being abused as a child and lasting feelings of shame, anger and anxiety. He tells us about his drug use and struggles with alcohol. And he tells us about being arrested on suspicion of possessing images taken from a child-pornography Web site.

(He says he was trying to come to terms with being abused as a child himself, and was helping to “set up a research program for a new support system for survivors of childhood abuse.” And while he was given a formal police caution, he was cleared of the possession charge.)

Mr. Townshend’s many internal conflicts are exhaustively mapped.

More here.

Jacob Mikanowski in The Awl:

Before Facebook, there was the photo studio: a room, a camera, and a photographer. Once upon a time, studio portraiture was an essential part of the visual vernacular. Like most vernaculars, studio photography was at once ubiquitous and invisible. Along with mug shots, crime scene photographs, aerial surveys and family snapshots, it belonged to the teeming undergrowth of photography, the network of practices and forms that sometimes predate and often anticipate its emergence as a recognized art form. In the hands of its greatest practitioners, it's without question an art in its own right. But great portraits can also be the result of bureaucratic procedure, automatic gesture, or blind luck.

Studio photography is always at risk of seeming banal, and indeed, most of the photographs produced in portraiture's heyday seem today either rote or bland. But a few of these photographers made work that remains indelible, and one of these was Hashem El Madani. For fifty years, beginning in 1949, Madani worked as a photographer in Sidon, a city in southern Lebanon. He began as an apprentice for a Jewish photographer in Haifa. After the events of 1948, he moved to Lebanon. At first he took pictures of his friends and family members. A few years later, he opened his own studio, called the Studio Scheherazade, above a cinema of the same name. With time, he became Sidon’s leading photographer. By his own estimate he photographed ninety percent of the people in town, amassing an archive of some five hundred thousand images.

Madani was a craftsman, providing a vital service for the people of his adopted city, taking photographs for ID cards, passports, weddings and christenings. But he was also an artist of rare power. His portraits preserve their subjects’ individuality. Unlike the work of artists like Richard Avedon or Diane Arbus, these photos don’t attempt to unmask or expose their subjects. Madani’s work is intimate without being intrusive. His photographs are often masterful, but they can also be rote or workmanlike, and their full impact only becomes clear when they are viewed in aggregate.

More here.

Husain Haqqani in Newsweek Pakistan:

Thousands of cellphone subscribers in Pakistan received an anonymous text message recently announcing a miracle: an earthquake on Tuesday, Sept. 18, had destroyed the Washington, D.C. movie theater that was exhibiting Innocence of Muslims, the controversial film that has triggered violent protests in several Muslim countries. An email version of the text message even included a picture of a mangled structure. Allah, the texter claimed, had shown His anger against the movie’s insult to Islam and Islam’s Prophet, and with Him on their side the faithful should not be afraid to vent their anger against the West, which belittles Islam and abuses the Prophet. There was, of course, no earthquake in Washington, and no movie theater had been destroyed. In fact, the movie has never made its way beyond YouTube. But for several days, the fabricated text message and email made the rounds, forwarded and reforwarded around Pakistan and in some cases to Pakistanis living in the diaspora. It was part of a campaign to arouse Muslim passions by what author Salman Rushdie has termed “the outrage industry.” Similar false mass messaging convinced millions after 9/11 that Jews had been warned to stay away from the Twin Towers, implying a conspiracy that many still believe without a shred of evidence. Last year, after U.S. special forces killed Osama bin Laden, anonymous messages suggested that the raid in Abbottabad was a staged event and bin Laden had been killed months earlier.

Steven Novella in Neurologica:

In an article for Newsweek, neurosurgeon Eben Alexander recounts his near death experience during a coma from bacterial meningitis. This is sure to become a staple of the NDE/afterlife community, as Alexander recounts in articulate and breathless terms his profound experience. His book is called, Proof of Heaven – a bold claim for someone who insists he is and remains a scientist.

Alexander claims:

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

While his experience is certainly interesting, his entire premise is flimsily based on a single word in the above paragraph – “while.” He assumes that the experiences he remembers after waking from the coma occurred while his cortex was completely inactive. He does not even seem aware of the fact that he is making that assumption or that it is the central premise of his claim, as he does not address it in his article.

More here.

From The Paris Review:

Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off, I am up about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad—have managed a poem a day before breakfast. All book poems. Terrific stuff, as though domesticity had choked me.

—Sylvia Plath, letter to her mother, October 12, 1962

They were “dawn poems in blood,” those lines stormed onto paper while the children slept; several of them were written through fevers, and the heat seared onto the pages, those old memorandum sheets marked Smith College, or the back of a manuscript marked The Calm. That had been a radio play, drafted by Ted Hughes in their flat in London early the previous year; now Sylvia Plath was in the Devon farmhouse they’d bought soon afterward, and Hughes was back in London, banished, their marriage over. It was late 1962, and in the space of eight weeks, it brought Plath forty of what would become her Ariel poems. They were, she wrote to the poet Ruth Fainlight, “free stuff I had locked in me for years,” and now they were out. And they were astonishing. Only pain could have released them, only fury and outrage and jealousy and panic of the sort into which Plath’s daily universe had plunged. “I kept telling myself I was the sort that could only write when peaceful at heart,” she told Fainright, “but that is not so, the muse has come to live here, now Ted is gone.”

All of these poems would be in the black binder found in Plath’s London flat following her suicide just three months later, on February 11.

More here.