by Meghan Rosen

Dear 3QD Readers:

I had originally intended to post a review of Carl Zimmer’s latest contribution to the world of science writing, A Planet of Viruses, an excellent little book (just 94 pages from introduction to epilogue) that explores the vast realm and long history of some of Earth’s most fascinating life forms. Throughout the book, Zimmer’s knack for imagery helps provide an easy sense of scale (he tries in a variety of different ways, for example, to help readers grasp the enormous number of marine viruses compared to other ocean dwellers: “Viruses outnumber all other residents of the ocean by about 15 to one. If you put all of the viruses of the ocean on a scale, they would equal the weight of seventy-five million blue whales.”), and his focus on scientific research places each chapter comfortably in the space between popular science non-fiction and science textbook. In fact, I’d recommend it not only to those who like microbiology, but also to science educators looking to introduce students to our fascinating ‘planet of viruses’.

My detailed review, however, will have to wait until next month, because I was happily surprised with the early arrival of the newest addition to our family: a baby girl, born on the morning of May 13th. In honor of her birth (who said Friday the 13th was an unlucky day?), I’ve decided to post a review of a wonderful book I read this summer: Origins: How The Nine Months Before Birth Shape The Rest Of Our Lives. It seemed appropriate.

Origins:

I’m 131 pages into Origins, but was hooked after the first chapter. Annie Murphy Paul has written a book that every woman (expectant or not), father-to-be, scientist, science buff, and lover of babies will want to read. (As a female scientist who adores babies, you can see why it appealed to me.) Paul compiles and distills much of what is known about the environment’s effect on the embryo and relates it to her own experience navigating the murky, ever-changing waters of prenatal care. We follow her, month by month, as she explores the science behind each stage of fetal development.

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by Hasan Altaf

When we talk about Pakistan, generally what we talk about is change. Most conversations will involve headshaking and sighs and riffs on the idea that things – take your pick: security, economy, culture, education, health – are “getting worse”; most conversations also will have one person to point out all the things that are “getting better.” But whichever position one takes, progress or regress, growth or decay, what’s behind it is change.

This is of course true for most countries; we compare how they are now to how they were then. At an individual level too we tend to believe firmly in the possibility and even the inevitability of some kind of change, at some point, somehow: Today is not yesterday, and tomorrow will not be today; something will be different, because something has to be different. Politics, advertising, media, self-improvement; they’re all based on this belief.

It would be foolish to deny that Pakistan has changed over the years. It’s changed right in front of us. Everyone, I imagine, has their own metric for this, their own yardstick (for a lot of people it’s cell phones) but I think most of us see it. Sometimes, though, it seems that this might not be as true as we think, and in many ways, Pakistan is stuck in the past.

For a project recently I had to dig through several years worth of editorials in two Urdu newspapers, Jang and Nawa-i-Waqt, starting with 1995. The experience was actually eerie. Almost everything that was written fifteen years ago could have been written yesterday. Low literacy rates, insufficient power generation, strikes, ethnic violence, terrorism, Bhuttos, Sharifs, trips-to-America, foreign hands, poverty, misery, elegies, eulogies, laments, hope. When the subject was Pakistan, it wasn’t at all hard to imagine that they were talking about today’s Pakistan. It’s not time travel or even time-lapsed; it’s just as if time didn’t exist, and in some ways for Pakistan the past nearly two decades had never happened.

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by Nick Werle

In the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing on May 2, veterans of the Bush Administration have hit the airwaves in an effort to reserve for their policies a portion of the credit for the success of SEAL Team Six’s covert lethal mission in Abbottabad. Chief among the many Bush policies they credit with enabling President Obama’s team to kill bin Laden are those permitting the torture and “rendition” of foreign combatants. According to John Yoo, Karl Rove, and their cohort, so-called “enhanced interrogations” led directly to bin Laden’s suburban compound in Pakistan. However, none of the details of the four year-long intelligence trail leading to the SEAL operation released by the current administration suggests that the C.I.A. gained any useful information from detainees subjected to waterboarding or other controversial techniques. Indeed, two detainees tortured at Guantánamo Bay – including the “9/11 mastermind,” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times – intentionally misled interrogators about the identity, whereabouts, and operational role of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, bin Laden’s personal courier and the thread that led American spies to the $1 million compound in Abbottabad.

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by James McGirk

I was born beside Sigmund Freud’s London townhome, and spent the next eighteen years ferried between Europe and Asia. Nominally American, it was not until I was seventeen-years-old that I could actually call the U.S. home, and even then I was so jangled from the shock of moving from India to a mountainous midwestern state, that I felt as if I had arrived from another planet. This was more than mere discomfort, I was so confused and unsure of who I was and what my role was meant to be I lost the ability to speak for months. Many years later – as a freshly minted Master of the Fine Art of fiction writing – one of my deepest anxieties stems from this dislocation and lack of authority. I lack a homeland to plunder for deep, meaningful memories from. Flannery O’Connor had Savannah, Georgia and generations of roots feeding her creations, Saul Bellow had Chicago, and Alice Munro has Southwestern Ontario. My own memories seem too fragmented and distant for the deep aesthetic dives they take, unless there is such a thing as expatriate literature. Could there be such a thing?

Immigrant fiction has a long, rich tradition that is not quite the same as expatriate fiction. Perhaps the difference has to do with authority. Migration has always been part of the human experience. For millennia we have been herded about and forcibly relocated. Immigration is active. To uproot your home and set it down elsewhere is a story. There is conflict and action built into this experience, so it lends itself to fictionalization. But being an expatriate is a completely different level of engagement than being immigrant. You either arrive as an agent or you arrive as a tourist. Either way you remain aloof; tethered elsewhere, staying at the whim of a foreign government, in a role where any intervention on your part is an imposition of some sort. Expatriate action either lacks agency, or is pure adventure and thus politically moot. What authority can an expatriate writer possibly have when compared to a national or an immigrant’s perspective? Outside of nationalist chauvinism, their only claim to some sort of special authority would be data based, such as technical expertise – the expatriate as consultant or mercenary; or as a gleaner of information – the expatriate as a journalist or spy.

Marco Polo, the great 13^th Century Venetian traveler, was all of the above. He was a representative in the court of Kublai Khan and an agent of his family business concern.

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by Jonathan Halvorson

Most people regard health care reform in America as thoroughly bungled. The proverbial train left the station weak and wheezing, was pushed off the rails by hooligans and is about to crumple in an inglorious heap in the ditch. Only about 20% say the reform hits the sweet spot, with the rest convinced it went too far or didn’t go far enough.

To review the most recent pilings-on: in a time of huge Federal deficits, we get depressing predictions that the PPACA will do little or nothing to slow the growth of health care costs. Only a year after passage of what was supposed to be comprehensive reform, Democrats acknowledge that Medicare and Medicaid spending remain out of control and propose new cuts in the hundreds of billions. In the span of four months, Republicans switched from posing as aggrieved defenders of Medicare spending, to proposing to slash it and leave seniors to absorb the spillover. Medicaid funding is probably even more precarious, since fewer Medicaid recipients vote.

To add injury to injury, the Supreme court may rule to invalidate the entire law, or perhaps just the mandate to purchase insurance, thereby removing the most hated part of the law, but eliminating the “universal” part of universal coverage and inviting an actuarial death spiral. Oh, and the few reforms that look like they might bring costs down, like the IPAB board in Medicare and the minimum medical expense ratio for insurers, are under threat of being watered down. A year after legislation has been passed that will transform nearly a fifth of the American economy, to the casual observer it looks like nothing much has happened and nothing in the future is secure, especially anything that the big industry players don’t like.

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by Julia Galef

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein gets credit for pointing out that many classic philosophical conundrums are unsolvable not because they are so profound, but because they are incoherent. Instead of trying to solve such questions, he argued, we should try to dissolve them, by demonstrating how they misuse words and investigating the confusion that motivated the question in the first place.

But with all due respect to Wittgenstein, my favorite example of the “dissolving questions” strategy comes from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which contains a cheeky and unforgettable dissolution of which I’m sure Wittgenstein himself would have been proud: A race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings builds a supercomputer named Deep Thought, so that they can ask it the question that has preoccupied philosophers for millions of years: “What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?”

After seven and a half million years of computation, Deep Thought finally announces the answer: Forty-two. In response to the programmers’ howls of disappointment and confusion, Deep Thought rather patiently points out that the reason his answer doesn’t make any sense is because their original question didn’t make any sense either. As I’ve written before, questions like this one, or the very similar “What is the meaning of life?” question, seem to be committing a basic category error: life isn’t the kind of thing to which the word “meaning” or “answer” applies.

But in this article I want to take my analysis a little further than that.

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by Dave Munger

It's 10:00 on a beautiful Sunday morning in California. To my left is some of the most spectacular coastline America has to offer. I'm walking along a road on Point Lobos that is ordinarily packed with cars on days like this, but today, thanks in part to my $135 entry fee, the road has been closed to traffic.

There's only one problem: I should be running, not walking. Over the past year, I've spent hundreds of dollars on running gear and race entry fees. I've logged more than 1,600 miles training for this event, including nearly 1,000 miles in the past four months alone. I've lost over 35 pounds and steadily improved my speed and stamina. Why can't I make my body do what I've trained it to do?

Dozens of runners pass me on either side, each of them experiencing varying degrees of misery similar to my own. Most of them, like me, have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to get here, spending $500, $1,000 or more to participate in this event, the Big Sur International Marathon. Like Boston, New York, Paris, and Berlin, Big Sur is a “destination marathon,” a once-in-a-lifetime experience that is so beloved, many runners return year after year.

The race was run on May 1 this year, but Big Sur's 4,500 spots for marathoners had already sold out last October. Other races sell out even faster. This year's Boston Marathon, despite strict qualification standards, sold out in 8 hours. The 2011 Marine Corps Marathon, which tours the monuments of Washington, DC, sold out its 30,000 spots in 28 hours.

While I'm a better-than-average runner, I'm by no means a competitive athlete. My best finish ever was fourth place, in a 5-kilometer race that only had 74 participants, many of whom were walking the entire course. I'm certain that there are several hundred runners faster than me who live within 50 miles: When I do well in a race, it's either because those guys aren't racing, or they're racing elsewhere.

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by Akim Reinhardt

There is pervasive form of Americana that is a pubescent rite of passage for so many: car culture. But having been born and raised in the Bronx, I never acclimated it.

I walked to P.S. 24. I walked to J.H.S. 141. I walked or took a city bus to John F. Kennedy High School. I rode the subway to Manhattan. When it came time for my first big trip, off to college in Michigan at age seventeen, I boarded an airplane. And when I arrived there, I discovered a dormitory hall-full of young men who loved to talk about cars: their cars, their parents’ cars, cars they’d worked on, cars they pined for, cars they’d stared at longingly in the glossy pages of magazines, and cars that whizzed by on the street as they stood there, talking about cars.

It was mysterious babel to me. Baseball and football I could talk about. Music? Sure. I could even gab about history a little bit if you pressed me. But the infatuation with cars was completely foreign. And it is a language I would never learn with any real fluency. To this day, when I enter that world, all I can manage to do is smile, order the first thing on the menu, and ask where the bathroom is. And even at that, half the time I end up pissing in the alley.

It’s not that we were a carless NYC family. In fact, my father had always owned a car. But that did not spring out of any desire. It was a necessity. He was a general contractor, so he needed something to haul his tools, materials, and workers in; something he could sling a 40-foot ladder onto. I grew up riding in work vehicles that stunk of cigarettes and were oft grumbled about.

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[Satellite photo of Manhattan on 9/11. The red circle is my own location at the time.]

by S. Abbas Raza

I hated Osama Bin Laden, and I suppose I probably had more personal reasons to hate him than most.

When I was just beginning grad school in the philosophy department at Columbia University, I met a remarkably self-assured young man who was an undergrad there at the time. We were both originally from Pakistan and I became a sort of mentor to him, despite the fact that most of the time he argued with me endlessly about almost everything. He was bright and vivacious, if headstrong, and a born leader. He was also very funny and made me laugh a lot. He took me to meet his parents and five-year-old brother at their hotel in midtown Manhattan when they came from Pakistan for his graduation. They seemed extremely proud of their oldest of two children. After graduating from Columbia, he got an MBA from Emory University, and then joined a bank.

Unsurprisingly, he rose through the ranks at almost unbelievable speed and was a senior executive by the time he turned 29. Still having the boyish enthusiasms of a young man, he bought a BMW 740 iL, his pride and joy, which we cruised around in on many an evening, with me at the wheel as often as not. He talked about getting married to his girlfriend, a lovely American girl he had met a year or so earlier. Soon after, on the bright and crisp morning of September 11, 2001, he awoke early to get to a business meeting at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. His last phone call was to his girlfriend. He said he'd call again once he got out.

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by Mohsin Rizvi

As the world celebrates the death of Osama bin Laden, I wonder if this reaction is worth a life so trivial. It is true that Osama bin Laden was the greatest terrorist ever, that he took thousands of lives, and orchestrated horrific acts of violence. However, it cannot be ignored that in the end, bin Laden was just one man… Nothing more, and nothing less…

I refuse to attribute all the torture and hardships the world has faced in the last decade to one person's actions and beliefs. The world is no better than it was while he lived. The American government still taps our phones, racially profiles people, illegally holds inmates at Guantanamo Bay, and still has troops spread out through the Middle-East. Sectarian violence still exists in Muslims countries, religious fundamentalists continue to impose their ideals through violence, and women are still universally denied equal treatment…

So why are we dancing at Ground Zero?

I recall all the sacrifices made by the American people to give their political leadership the power to successfully hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden. I feel the consequence of those sacrifices everyday. The death of bin Laden is not an “accomplishment” of the American government, it is simply a promise being upheld by those we pay our taxes too. It's nothing more than a fair trade. Thats capitalism, it's the American dream. American citizens gave up their privacy, freedoms, money, and lives to get Osama bin Laden and some of us citizens are not going to say “thank you” for the government holding up its side of the bargain. We gave up a lot for the promise of “getting him”, and our sacrifices fueled a monster larger and more capable of destruction than one man's fanatic worldview.

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By Aditya Dev Sood

A man is hurtling towards you from some twenty paces away. He leaps to hurl a projectile at you with all his might. You can duck, you can flinch, or you can swat it away with your blade, stylish, balanced of body and mind, having yet again defended your wicket. There is tremendous fury and violence in cricket, only just restrained by the the spatial logic of the playing field and the ritual logic of each set of six balls, each over bowled by a different bowler.

The great cricketing theorist Douglas Adams was the first to explore the symbolic logic of the game. What are those three stakes, planted into the ground in a row, delicately supporting the bails above? Do they, for instance, relate to the fundamentals of architecture as expressed in the Stonehenge? My own view is that they represent a kind of abstracted straw or wooden man, his two legs and dangling middle stick now all that remains of his dismembered body, his stump. Each team must protect its carcass of a king from the slings and arrows of the opposing side.

Unlike baseball, which is played within a single Cartesian quadrant, excluding the howling crowds behind its two perpendicular foul-lines, the topography of cricket has a bipolar, side-switching logic. There are two stumps on either side of a cricketing pitch, which is twenty-two paces long, and two batsmen from the same team defend those wickets from alternating sides in subsequent overs. Members of the fielding team range all around them in every direction at various distances, resulting in a panoptic field of observation, evaluation and reaction which eventually extends to us spectators, sitting in thrall outside the boundary line.

The use of alternate ends of the cricketing pitch somewhat resembles the alternation of service in tennis and similar racquet sports, and the switching of courts at the end of every set. Still, no other game has precisely this kind of running, alternating, side-switching logic, and I have had to think hard to propose a possible source. I believe it could derive from the logic of medieval jousting, which required mounted adversaries to ride in towards one another, lances drawn, till one of them fell. One imagines their heralds and stewards playing with that armor at dusk, swatting back with wooden clubs the stones thrown upon the absent form of the knight. Or even an early game of cricket played by a two-man team, one bowler, one batsman, each bowler thundering in simultaneously from either end of the pitch to the other side's defending batsman, until one of them got lucky, and broke through to break the opposition's middle stump. This practice of simultaneous attack and defense eventually being unraveled over the centuries into the logic of 'innings.'

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Asymptotic reasoning is ubiquitous in mathematics and the natural sciences, representing both a general approach to problems as well as a collection of techniques. It is one way of answering the question, “Which features of the world are relevant for our understanding?” Often, the behavior of a system gets simpler as it gets larger: only some of the features that are relevant for understanding a small system are necessary for understanding a very large one. The averaging out of fluctuations in the long-term is perhaps the most obvious example of this. Asymptotic analysis attempts to describe the behavior of an object (function, physical system, algorithm) as some quantity gets very large or very small. It is thus fundamentally the study of particular sorts of approximations, albeit approximations that can be made as precise as one wants, and a guide to which features of an object can safely be ignored.

To start with a simple example, look at what happens to the square of a number and to its cube as the number gets bigger and bigger. Both the square and the cube race off to infinity, but one does so faster than the other. 1³ and 1² are the same; 2³ is twice as big as 2²; 3³ is thrice as big as 3² and so on. For any number N, N³ is N times as big as N², and as N gets really big the function N² is dwarfed by N³. So to see how the behavior of a function could become simpler as it approaches infinity, look at the behavior of

N³+N²

If we are thinking asymptotically, we would say that this function behaves like N³: for any degree of approximation we choose the contribution of N² will be irrelevant for large enough N. Here “large enough” depends on the degree of approximation we want. If we decide that irrelevant means “contributes less than 1% to the value of the function”, then N² is irrelevant once we reach N=100; if instead we decide that it means less than 0.01%, then we must wait till N=10,000, and so on. The crucial point here is that we can satisfy any desired degree of approximation, no matter how stringent.

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by Michael Blim

For America’s liberals, these are soul-trying times. The romance with Barack Obama is over. They have discovered, as one pundit in the Washington Post put it, there he is an Eisenhower Republican. In fairness to Obama, he never promised to be anything else, as perceptive commentators before the election noted. Yet, as the stuff of liberal wish-fulfillment, Obama could not be resisted: a self-identified African-American, a Harvard lawyer trained by some of the best minds liberalism still possessed, and a product of Hyde Park Chicago liberal patronage with some church-related street organizing thrown in, Obama embodied the dream of a new multicultural liberalism that would overcome social tensions by the force of his example. And liberalism would become the majority creed once more.

The economic crisis of the last three years has put paid to the wish, and the Obama administration shows every indication of putting an end to American liberalism, the one hundred-year plus political movement that sought a state dedicated to human improvement, equal opportunity, and the regulation of capitalism.

American liberalism arose at the turn of the 20^th Century when the middle class produced by our nation’s massive industrial great leap forward began to make money and to thirst for the power to remake American society in its own image. It strived to make an America that was educated, efficient, and fair. Convinced that social problems could be solved through scientific study and pragmatic policy-making that prescribed specific remedies, American liberalism sought to regulate business abuses, restore competition in markets, and to build, albeit incrementally, a welfare state. It sought the upper hand politically by eschewing social democracy, thus rejecting any real need for power sharing with labor and the working class. Ensnared by its own narcissistic self-regard, it imagined itself the guardian of the general interest; every other group or class was just a special interest.

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by Tom Jacobs

I stick a patch on my shoulder and I think of Einstein’s brain. It’s in a vat, the brain, that is. A brain in a vat. The body is long gone, but the brain remains. A controlled-release of nicotine enters my bloodstream and I also think of Dean Moriarty, the father I never found. I think of Einstein’s brain and of old Dean Moriarty, each barreling down toward the vanishing point of I-80, one beside the other, pursuing the ever-receding sunset.

Einstein’s brain travelled across country in a jar. His brain sat shotgun (well, in the trunk, actually, but it’s nicer to think of his brain sitting shotgun). Then there is Kerouac/Sal Paradise with Cassady/Moriarty, careening down I-80, the interstate that slices right through the US all the way out to San Francisco. And then back again, culminating at the? ass end of I-80, at the George Washington Bridge, the view of which was once afforded to me out the bedroom window of one of my first apartments in the city. I would look at the bridge and imagine the road beyond, and the bald head of the sun sinking into the earth, and think of “all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it.” My mind travels Westward into the night like Einstein’s be-vatted brain, but my body remains rooted in my apartment on 181st street. And really, my mind, too, is trapped in the envelope of my body, such as it is, that stares out the window imagining all the people dreaming.

Dickhead that I am, I don’t know if this is important or silly.

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by Sue Hubbard

Can art regenerate a community? Can building an architect designed gallery in a socially deprived area change its fortunes? Everyone wants a Bilbao Guggenheim. Almost overnight Bilbao was transformed from a culturally moribund commercial centre in an unfashionable corner of Spain’s Basque region to a must-see destination. After its opening in 1997 hundreds of thousands of tourists began to pour into the city just to visit Frank Ghery’s new building. Then came the knock- on effects: the new hotels, the expanding of the airport, the upgrading of facilities and extra employment and, hey-presto, Bilbao was changed forever.

It was a far sighted decision by the local burghers even though there was, at the time, much opposition. But the result is one of the most extraordinary and beautiful modern buildings you will see anywhere. Tate St. Ives, above Porthmeor beach, has also been a success. But here the project was built on an historic legacy, for St. Ives has, due to its especial clarity of light, had a thriving artistic community since the 19^th century. The tiny fishing village, a popular middle-class holiday destination, already attracted people who might be expected to visit a gallery.

But the opening of Turner Contemporary this week, in the rundown seaside resort of Margate, most famous in recent years as the childhood home of the artist Tracey Emin, has a bigger challenge on its hands.

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