Can it be coincidence that shoemakers like Maurizio Gucci of Florence and Salvatore Ferragamo of Campania and Florence came from places with strong Etruscan connections? A tomb painting from the Etruscan city of Tarquinia, executed perhaps around 530-520 BC, shows several mourners in elegant pointed boots. The people portrayed in this “Tomb of the Augurs” may well have had close connections with Rome, where the ruling dynasts were named Tarquinius, and the tyrant-slayer Brutus, credited with founding the Roman Republic a few years after this tomb was decorated (509 BC), was actually a Tarquinius on his mother’s side. When Roman patricians sported red shoes in subsequent centuries, they were simply carrying on ancestral tradition. With the red shoes went a red-striped robe, again in Phoenician purple—a wide stripe for members of the Senate, a narrower stripe for the second-rank aristocrats known as horsemen, equites. After the coming of Christianity, the tradition of wearing red passed from the Roman Senate to the “Sacred Senate,” the College of Cardinals. Cardinal red, in fact, is Roman senatorial red, derived from Phoenician purple (or a cheaper—but not cheap—substitute called cochineal, made by grinding the shells of beetles).

more from Massimo Gatto at the NYRB here.

From The Independent:

Domestic and demure. Neat and sweet. Sugar and spice and all things nice… but what happens when girls go bad? It's a subject that has long fascinated, and titillated, the press, public, and politicians, from whispers over 'fallen women' in the past to drunken 'sluts' slumped in the gutter in 2013. Now a new book, Girl Trouble, by the cultural historian Carol Dyhouse, explores the history of our moral panics over rebel girls, from the late-19th century onwards. Dyhouse found herself “more and more interested in rebel girls, bad girls, the ones who went off the rails. They're not exactly feminist, but they're representing a discontent with what's in front of them. It allows you an insight into the constraints young women have operated under.” And what constraints… from an inability to vote, own property, prevent pregnancy, get a degree, an abortion, or a job, to more ephemeral, societal expectations of decorous behaviour, obedience to men, feminine beauty, and sexual restraint. No wonder nearly every generation had its own modern lasses who stuck their fingers up at societal norms and got stuck into enjoying themselves instead.

ABDULRAZZAQ AL-SAIEDI in The New York Times:

We arrived in Falluja to see people gathered around two burned-out S.U.V.’s. Insurgents had gunned down four Blackwater security contractors who were driving through the city; a mob had set the vehicles ablaze. My reporter’s instincts carried me, almost against my will, through the sea of rioters, to where the bodies of the contractors had been dragged — a bridge over the Euphrates about a half-mile away. Two bodies were on the ground, their jackets still smoking. A boy of about 10 was kicking one of them, yelling, “Pacha, pacha,” the name of an Iraqi dish made from the head of a sheep. It crossed my mind that this child could not be human. Then my attention turned to the bodies swinging mutilated from the bridge. I felt briefly disoriented. Hordes of people glared at me, a stranger in a small, insular city. I pretended to be part of the crowd. “These Americans deserve this destiny!” I yelled. I knew I would be the fifth body if I were exposed as a reporter for a U.S. paper. When I returned to the bureau in Baghdad, I resolved to quit my job with The New York Times. It was too dangerous and too upsetting to witness the seething violence so closely. A few years later, after losing two of my Iraqi colleagues at The Times, both of whom were murdered, I finally did leave, to pursue a graduate degree and get away from a lifetime of war.

I never imagined that on the quiet streets of Cambridge, Mass. — a world away from the chaos of Iraq — I would meet Donna Zovko, the mother of one of the murdered contractors. Zovko had come to attend an event at Harvard; a friend introduced us, knowing that I had been in Falluja just after her son was killed. We met for breakfast in an Au Bon Pain on a rainy Sunday in late winter. The woman sitting across from me was soft-spoken and warm, referring to me as “a young boy” (I was 39) and asking me about my life in Iraq. I learned from Zovko that, as I was standing in that mob in Falluja, she was listening to a radio report of the deaths of four Americans in Iraq. She had e-mailed her son Jerry, telling him to be careful. Two hours later, she learned that he was among the four killed. In the cafe, she became suddenly quiet, and her eyes fixed on mine. “Please tell me what happened to my son,” she pleaded. “Why he died like this.” I started to cry. I didn’t know how to tell her about the terrible scene I witnessed. I replied elusively: “He was killed quickly. He was shot.” My words hung in the air. “Then why was he burned and dragged?” she asked quietly. “Why did they do that?” As she spoke, my thoughts rushed to my own mother. I told Zovko that my brother was executed by Saddam Hussein’s security forces in Abu Ghraib. What if our situations were reversed and Zovko had seen my brother killed? What could she say to my mother to explain how or why it happened? We consoled each other. In that moment, there was no difference between Jerry’s mother and mine. Each had lost her beloved oldest son to a violent, unjust end: Jerry was 32; Sadoon was 36. Zovko told me that she was not angry with the Iraqis who murdered her son. Instead, she empathized with Iraqi mothers who lost children to the American forces.

The American invasion of Iraq took place 10 years ago this month. Even before the invasion, I lived most of my life in war zones, losing friends and relatives with numbing frequency. We thought the trauma of war would be over when Hussein was deposed in 2003, but it extends past the execution of a thug. Ten years ago, I called the Iraq war the right war, but now, I cannot say that I know that such a thing exists.

More here. (Note: Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi is a former New York Times reporter and a Nieman fellow at Harvard. He is currently a senior researcher with Physicians for Human Rights.)

Logan K. Young in 3:AM Magazine:

“(You mean you don’t own a copy? What are you, sick or something?)”

– Lester Bangs, “A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise”

May 5-6, 1978. For once, it really did happen so fast. All of it. Rather literally, too. Blink, bat an eye or go take a piss, and you probably missed it. (Those things worth remembering, anyways.) What a bummer. Indeed. If you weren’t there, then you just don’t know. Alas, such is life; you have to seize it while ye may. But even if you were around (and you truly were doing it right) you still don’t remember. (Or at least you shouldn’t.) The ones that claim total recall, well, suffice it to say they’re lying. They have to be. For No Wave was the one, true Blank Generation. Yes. It took Aristotle’s tabula rasa, and with one flailing swipe per Attali, all the rest was noise. Noise being code for negation — a deliberate dithering of all things affirmative — No Wave is then best described not by what it was, but instead by what it wasn’t: no shirt, no shoes, no problem. No fucking future. None at all.

But what’s really in a name? No, seriously? It’s a simple enough inquisition. The line is straight, ‘tis the answer what’s crooked. Ensconced in the void plied by these otherwise nameless, at-risk kids, that inquiry becomes a near tautology. Is the thing now the name? Dunno. Is its name just a thing now? Ibid. So, like Beckett’s L’innommable, perhaps anything longform on No New York is primordially flawed. We shan’t go on; we shall go on. On y va! After all, there’s music, movies and mores left to kill. Still. Janie, get your gun.

To be fair, such existential quandaries didn’t matter to a group like Mars. Meanwhile, a band such as D.N.A. couldn’t be bothered. Likewise, not a single epistemological shit was given by Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. And The Contortions, umm, they were just too cool. Sorry. Basically, they were all looking only for a light. But what we’ve come to call ‘No Wave’ wasn’t anyone’s beacon. That’s for damn sure. A raging burnout in a left-for-dead New York City, nah, it was not built to last the night. Everything about it (the look, the feel, the lifestyle…the savagery) was ephemeral. On purpose, no less.

Scott Atran in the Huffington Post:

With the so-called sequester geared to cut billions of dollars to domestic programs, military funding, social services, and government-sponsored scientific research — including about a 6 percent reduction for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation — policymakers and professionals are scrambling to stave off the worst by resetting priorities. One increasingly popular proposal among congressional budget hawks is to directly link federal funding of science to graduate employment data that seriously underestimates the importance and impact of social sciences to the nation at large, in order to effectively justify eliminating social science from the federal research budget. For example, federal legislation introduced by Senators Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), would require states to match information from unemployment insurance databases with individual student data and publish the results, which would show earnings by program at each institution of higher education. But educators and economists note that measuring return on investment via salary alone is too simplistic: liberal arts majors often start out at lower salaries but make more than their peers in later decades. Even more worrisome, in the guise of practicality, such maneuvers offer up a not-so-veiled attempt to justify eliminating government funding for the social sciences, perilously underestimating their importance and impact to the economy and national welfare.

More here. And Scott's article in Foreign Policy is here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Two years ago, Mike Archer from the University of New South Wales looked down a microscope and saw that a single fertilised frog egg had divided in two. Then, it did it again. And again. Eventually, the egg produced an embryo containing hundreds of cells.

“There were a lot of hi-fives going around the laboratory,” says Archer.

This might seem like an over-reaction. After all, millions of frog eggs divide into embryos every day, as they have done since before dinosaurs walked the earth. But this egg was special. Archer’s team of scientists had loaded it with the DNA of the southern gastric brooding frog—a bizarre creature that has been extinct for almost 30 years.

The fact that it started to grow into an embryo was a big deal. The fact that it never went further was disappointing, but not unexpected. This is cutting-edge science—cloning techniques put to the purpose of resurrection.

Archer’s goal is simple: To bring the extinct gastric brooding frog back from oblivion and, in doing so, provide hope for the hundreds of other frogs that are heading that way. Getting the embryo was a milestone and Archer is buoyantly optimistic that he’ll cross the finish line soon. Lazarus, he says, will rise again.

Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez in Boston Review:

There was a time when the world spoke of “Venezuelan Exceptionalism.” For nearly half a century—while Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay were military dictatorships, the Andean nations were trapped in a carousel of coups d’état, and violent civil insurgency seemed ubiquitous—Venezuela was South America’s only stable and functional democracy. Today that exceptionalism cuts the other way. As Latin America rises, Venezuela is a backwater, starkly divided on social and political grounds and wantonly violent: a world leader in kidnappings, murders, and prison riots. It is a country with a broken heart.

And now, with President Hugo Chávez dead from an unspecified cancer at just 58 years of age, things look bleaker than ever. There were times when I—long an unapologetic opponent of Chávez and his revolution—dreamed that an early death for El Comandante might save Venezuela. No such luck. In his short time in charge, Nicolás Maduro, the successor, has already proven himself to be as erratic as Chávez, a bit meaner, and far more insecure.

Yet I find myself traipsing into the backwoods of my own conviction. What if, in rejecting Chávez, I unwittingly placed myself on the wrong side of history? In the few days since the announcement of his death, I have found myself returning to this question often. Am I simply feeling compassion for a fellow person suffering and dying from terrible illness? Is it empathy for the millions who have responded to Chávez’s death with earnest sadness? Or perhaps, having so often spoken ill of the now dead, I have guilt on my conscience.

Fatima Shaik in In These Times:

The federal census taker comes every 10 years and, for most people in the United States, this has little consequence. But not where I lived, in New Orleans, just outside the historic district of Tremé. There, people talked to each other about whether to lie to the census taker and which lie to tell, and that conversation produced stories about who had disappeared from us and who had stayed, and what was more important: loyalty or money.

That was the mentality in Creole New Orleans from as far back as I can remember—that is, the 1950s—until recently. The lying, the disappearing, the money and lack of it had everything to do with race.

We were part of a mixed-race community of immigrants and Louisiana natives, and there was no place for us in the data tables of the census or in the mind of a black-and-white America. And yet we existed, for generations. Now, in a thoroughly researched new book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, Vivek Bald traces one vein of our lineage, from a most distant country.

Bald follows Muslim peddlers and, later, ship workers who journeyed from India to the United States at the turn of the 20th century. As local Indian markets for fabrics lost value in the 1880s, Muslim Bengali men began traveling abroad to find customers for “Oriental” wares—silk and cotton, handkerchiefs, bedspreads and tablecloths, and rugs. They found an eager appetite in the United States, where styles from the East were becoming fashionable, furnishing sitting rooms across the nation, from the homes of Northern socialites to New Orleans’ bordellos. Later, in the northeastern United States, Bengali mechanics arrived, often by jumping ship to escape the terrible working conditions in the furnace rooms of British steamers.

All of these men, too dark and foreign to be accepted in the white parts of town, entered segregated communities of color in New York, such as the Harlem of the book’s title, but also Detroit, New Orleans and, later, other large industrial U.S. cities. My grandfather, Shaik Mohamed Musa, a Bengali peddler who arrived in Tremé in 1896, was one of them.

Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. The analysis presented is based on a dataset of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes,detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests. The proposed model uses dimensionality reduction for preprocessing the Likes data, which are then entered into logistic/linear regression to predict individual psychodemographic profiles from Likes. The model correctly discriminates between homosexual and heterosexual men in 88% of cases, African Americans and Caucasian Americans in 95% of cases, and between Democrat and Republican in 85% of cases. For the personality trait “Openness,” prediction accuracy is close to the test–retest accuracy of a standard personality test. We give examples of associations between attributes and Likes and discuss implications for online personalization and privacy.

It is often said that Manet invented modern painting. He challenged the limits of the canvas frame, distorting perspective and depth, framing scenes as if with the lens of a camera, such that we only get part of the scene, bodies and rooms only partly in view. He also used heavily pronounced brushwork that constantly reminds us we are looking at paint on a canvas. Look at “Portrait of Emilie Ambre as Carmen” (1880), its quick brushstrokes create feathery outlines of body and costume, creating a swirl of color and light. Her face is the most detailed part of the work, the luminous white paint conveying a theatrical light giving the opera’s singer’s face clarity and depth. He also turned his attention away from the academic demands of grand historical scenes and, like the Impressionists whom he kept at a distance, made everyday moments of middle-class Parisian life, of street encounters and Opera lobbies, bar crowds and park strollers legitimate subjects of painting. Such scenes are also quite secular, absent religious or nationalist interests. They direct their gaze at the bourgeoisie’s own individual tastes and desires. And in this way, these paintings are pure theater. They turn the life of the city into painterly scenes, making the casual in own alluring spectacle.

more from James Polchin at The Smart Set here.

Though Francis of Assisi is the most popular saint in a long history of tortured bodies and souls, the fact that no pope until Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio would take his name says a lot about the timeless shadow from the 12th century to the 21st. The legacy of the first Francis is almost too much to bear. Today, on the spine of Assisi, where pilgrims jostle with peddlers of all things Francis, you see the extraordinary Giotto frescoes inside the basilica, a narrative of the saint’s life. That such a magnificent structure was built over the bones (interred beneath the floor of the lower church) of a man who often slept without a roof over his head is a testament to how a powerful movement can be co-opted. But another legacy, far removed from marbled ostentation, can be found in the Franciscan priests who try to follow the example of their founder. When my young nephew was murdered by gunfire a few years ago, it was soothing that a man in the brown robes, sandals and roped belt of the Franciscan order conducted the most humane of funeral masses.

more from Timothy Egan at The New York Times here.

In his 1915 Book of Wonders, popular science writer Rudolph Bodmer suggested that the association followed from the symbolic power of shells: “The sounds we hear when we hold a sea shell to the ear are not really the sound of the sea waves. We have come to imagine that they are because they sound like the waves of the sea, and knowledge that the shell originally came from the sea helps us to this conclusion very easily.”2 But the likeness, he urged, had a technical explanation—though one in which similitude still figured. Both sea and seashell sounds were generated by waves: “The sounds we hear in the sea shell are really air waves”—waves, that is, of concentrated, resonant noise from the listener’s surroundings. That explanation sought to supplant superstition with science, trading sublime enchantment for fascinating fact. The account in Bodmer’s book rested on a century of empirical and theoretical investigation in which sound had come to be understood as vibration, and not, as earlier, more numinously, on the model of music or voice, exampling what Jonathan Sterne names as a “shift from models of sound reproduction based on imitations of the mouth to models based on imitations of the ear.”

more from Stefan Helmreich at Cabinet here.

In The Loop

I heard from people after the shootings. People
I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely
the same message: how horrible it was, how little
there was to say about how horrible it was.
People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed
because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,
to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually
I answered these messages: there’s nothing
to say back except of course there’s nothing
to say, thank you for your willingness
to say it. Because this was about nothing.
A boy who felt that he was nothing,
who erased and entered that erasure, and guns
that are good for nothing, and talk of guns
that is good for nothing, and spring
that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some,
and scotch for others, and “and” for me
in this poem, “and” that is good
for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise
go about going away, bereft of us and us
of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing
like a scarf left on a train. As if the train,
empty of everything but a scarf, still opens
its doors at every stop, because this
is what a train does, this is what a man does
with his hand on a lever, because otherwise,
why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over,
and then it had just begun.
.

From The Telegraph:

From Harvard Magazine:

For patients with high blood pressure, doctors are likely to prescribe antihypertensive medication and provide detailed instructions about how much to take, and when. They have been less able to provide detailed dosage recommendations for exercise. Research shows that a regular walking, swimming, or tennis habit reduces chronic disease risk, but it’s been unclear just how much different levels of exercise might extend our lives. Now, a study coauthored by epidemiologist I-Min Lee, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, offers specific exercise prescriptions. Lee and her colleagues pooled data from six large studies that included information on the leisure activities and body mass index of more than 650,000 people older than 40, each of whom was followed for an average of 10 years. The researchers’ analysis revealed that subjects who completed the equivalent of 75 minutes of brisk walking each week—roughly 11 minutes a day—lived 1.8 years longer than those who didn’t exercise at all. Those who got the federally recommended minimum of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise a week—22 minutes every day, or 30 minutes a day, five days a week—gained 3.4 years.

Lee was somewhat surprised that even small amounts of movement made such a difference. “What we found is really encouraging,” she says. “If you do a little, you get a fairly good gain in years.”

More here.

Sam Anderson in The New York Times Magazine:

Anne Carson was uncomfortable with the idea of a traditional profile: a journalist following her around for a few days, like a private detective, noting her outfits and mannerisms, shadowing her on errands, making lists of furniture and wall decorations and pets, quizzing her students, standing behind her holding his breath while she tried to write in her journal. Carson is a private person. She prefers to be alone. (When her husband is traveling, Carson will call and tell him, “I miss you, but I’m having a great time.”) Her book jackets have no author photo. Her back-flap biography — “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living” — is so minimalist that it sounds like a parody of a back-flap biography. Carson told me that, years ago, she had a bad experience with the private-detective model of journalism and would prefer never to do it again. It took her publisher a couple of weeks to wear her down to the point that she would agree, even in a limited way, to participate in a profile. Carson later described those weeks as akin to water torture.

In the end, she agreed to exchange some e-mails. This felt like a significant victory.

Carson is usually referred to as a poet, but just about no one finds that label satisfying: her fans (for whom she does something more than poetry), her critics (for whom she does something less than poetry) or herself. She often labels her work in conspicuously nonpoetic terms. Her book “The Beauty of the Husband” is subtitled “A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos.” Her book “Decreation” is subtitled “Poetry, Essays, Opera.” Carson gives the impression — on the page, at readings — of someone from another world, either extraterrestrial or ancient, for whom our modern earthly categories are too artificial and simplistic to contain anything like the real truth she is determined to communicate. For two decades her work has moved — phrase by phrase, line by line, project by improbable project — in directions that a human brain would never naturally move. The approach has won her awards (MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan) and accolades and an electric reputation in the literary world.

In her day job, Carson, who is 62, is a professor of erratic subjects (ancient Greek, attention, artistic collaboration) at various universities around North America, where she appears for a semester at a time as — as she often puts it — “a visiting [whatever].” (Even when she says this out loud, she makes the bracket sign with her hands.) This, I think, is the best catchall description of Carson. Wherever she goes, whatever she does, she is always a “visiting [whatever].”

Jerry Coyne over at Why Evolution is True:

This episode smacks a bit of internet drama, which I try to avoid, but it also bears on scientific discourse, censorship, and civility, and I wanted to say a few words.

According to the “Arts Beat” site of the New York Times, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who organized a prestigious debate on the origins of the universe at The American Museum of Natural History, subsequently withdrew an invitation to one participant: the physicist/philosopher David Albert. Last April I wrote about how Albert had given a pretty negative review to Lawrence Krauss’s new book, A Universe from Nothing: Why there is Something Rather Than Nothing (a book that I wasn’t too keen on, either, but for different reasons). And, sure enough, Albert and others—including Krauss—had been invited to debate the topic of how something comes from nothing at the Museum. Then came the rude gesture:

The annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate is the American Museum of Natural History’s biggest public event, drawing sold-out crowds for an evening billed as bringing together “the finest minds in the world” to debate “pressing questions on the frontiers of scientific discovery.”

But this year’s installment, to be held March 20 under the heading “The Existence of Nothing,” may also be notable for the panelist who disappeared.

Among the speakers will be several leading physicists, including Lawrence M. Krauss, whose book “A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing” became a cause célèbre in the scientific blogosphere last spring after a scathing review in the New York Times Book Review by the philosopher David Z. Albert.

But Mr. Albert will not be onstage, having been abruptly disinvited by the museum several months after he agreed to take part.

Via Jennifer Ouellette, Melanie B. Tannenbaum over at Nature's SpotOn NYC:

When writing about anything pertaining to psychology or human nature, people love nothing more than a brain image lit up like a Christmas tree. These omnipresent images have been mockingly termed “brain porn”, defined by journalist Alissa Quart as a “willingness to accept seemingly neuroscientific explanations for nearly everything.” According to a team of British scientists led by Cliodhna O’Connor, many popular science articles will include “logically irrelevant neuroscience information” intended to “imbue an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility” (McCabe & Castel, 2008; O’Connor et al., 2012). You might see scientists or science writers displaying neuroimaging data as proof that their claims are objective or real.

Neuroscience is frequently used to discuss psychopathology in particular, with 36% of “neuroscience” mentions in mainstream articles referring to it (O’Connor et al., 2012). Psychopathology can include anything from dementia, ADHD, and schizophrenia to eating disorders, personality disorders, addiction, depression, and anxiety. Every time you see an article mentioning a study about how “neural correlates,” “brain structures” or “neurological functioning” can explain the above conditions, you should be on high alert for brain porn in action.

On one hand, attributing things like addiction or depression to the brain imbues these disorders with legitimacy. It’s not a choice, it’s not a shortcoming – it’s a disease. Yet this very blessing can also become a sufferer’s curse. Portraying certain brains as homogeneously “different” implies something about what those brains are not: normal. As O’Connor and colleagues note, searching for group-level brain differences implies that there is some sort of fundamentally unalterable contrast between “those” brains and “normal” brains. Although no one ever actually explains what a normal, healthy brain should look like, we do get a very clear picture from these articles of what the people possessing these brains are not – “criminal, overweight, homosexual, or mentally ill” (O’Connor et al., 2012). By drawing a line between “normal” and “abnormal” and pinning any individual differences on presumably unalterable brain structures, this logic reinforces social group divisions and perpetuates essentialist stereotypes.

Describing something like alcoholism as a disease can be a helpful practice in some regards. It legitimizes the need for beneficial social services and attempts to convince non-alcoholics that the disorder does not simply result from some kind of personal failure. However, it can also cause a great deal of harm by reinforcing the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with alcoholics’ brains, and that they are somehow biologically different from “normal people.”

This idea that things only seem “legitimate” once they have a biological correlate raises another point about the worrisome nature of neuroscience portrayals in the media.

Since today is the 134th anniversary of the birth of Albert Einstein, as a tribute to my greatest hero I am posting an essay I wrote almost eight years ago over a weekend in Shrewsbury, Massachussettes, at my sister Azra's house in which I attempted to present a very short explanation of Einstein's remarkable theory of Special Relativity. Don't let the straighforward math scare you, if you work your way slowly through it, I hope that you will be rewarded by a feeling of satisfaction and understanding.

A century ago, this was the situation: Galilean and Newtonian physics said that any descriptions of motion by any two inertial observers (for such observers, bodies acted on by no forces move in straight lines) in uniform (not accelerating) relative motion are equally valid, and the laws of physics must be exactly the same for both of them. Bear with me here: what this means is, for example, if you see me coming toward you at a speed of 100 mph, then we could both be moving toward each other at 50 mph, or I could be still and you could be moving toward me at 100 mph, or I could be moving toward you at 30 mph while you are coming at me at 70 mph, and so on. All these descriptions are equivalent, and it is always impossible to tell whether one of us is “really” moving or not; all we can speak about is our motion relative to each other. In other words, all motion is relative to something else (which is then the inertial frame of reference). So for convenience, we can always just insist that any one observer is still (she is then the “frame of reference”) and all others are in motion relative to her. This is known as the Principle of Relativity. Another way to think about this is to imagine that there are only two objects in the universe, and they are moving relative to one another: in this situation it is more clearly impossible to say which object is moving. (Think about this paragraph, reread it, until you are pretty sure you get it. Just stay with me, it gets easier from here.)

At the same time, James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electricity and magnetism implied that the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is absolute. The only way that this could be true is if Maxwell's equations refer to a special frame (see previous paragraph) of reference (that in which the speed of light is c) which can truly be said to be at rest. If this is the case, then an observer moving relative to that special frame would measure a different value for c. But in 1887, Michelson and Morley proved that there is no such special frame. Another way of saying this (and this is the way Einstein put it in 1905) is that the speed of light is fixed, and is independent of the speed of the body emitting it. (The details of the Michelson-Morley experiment are beyond the scope of this essay, so you'll have to take my word for this.)

Now we have a problem. We have two irreconcilable laws: 1) The Principle of Relativity, and 2) The absoluteness of the speed of light for all observers. They cannot both be true. It would be another eighteen years before a young clerk in the Swiss patent office would pose and then resolve this problem. Here's how he did it: he asked what would happen if they were both true.

Next, I will show how the various aspects of SR fall straight out of the assumption that both of these laws are true. I will focus in greater detail on the slowing down (dilation) of time, and then speak more briefly about length contraction, and the intertwining of space and time.

More here. Some months later I also wrote an short explanation of some aspects of General Relativity which you can read here.