Bill McKibben in The Nation:

The National Weather Service is kind of the anti–Mike Daisey, a just-the-facts operation that grinds on hour after hour, day after day. It’s collected billions of records (I’ve seen the vast vaults where early handwritten weather reports from observers across the country are stored in endless rows of ledgers and files) on countless rainstorms, blizzards and pleasant summer days. So the odds that you could shock the NWS are pretty slim.

Beginning in mid-March, however, its various offices began issuing bulletins that sounded slightly shaken. “There’s extremes in weather, but seeing something like this is impressive and unprecedented,” Chicago NWS meteorologist Richard Castro told the Daily Herald. “It’s extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year long periods of records to break records day after day after day,” the office added in an official statement.

It wasn’t just Chicago, of course. A huge swath of the nation simmered under bizarre heat. International Falls, Minnesota, the “icebox of the nation,” broke its old temperature records—by twenty-two degrees, which according to weather historians may be the largest margin ever for any station with a century’s worth of records. Winner, South Dakota, reached 94 degrees on the second-to-last day of winter. That’s in the Dakotas, two days before the close of winter.

More here.

Qazal (in vain)

What use if you've chanted all you know in vain?
Prayed, prostrated, bowed, but rose in vain?

Think you own the house in which you live?
That door leads nowhere; you open and close it in vain.

Think you soar? Think you touch the clouds?
You are earthbound; you stand on your toes in vain.

Think it was you who made the wheel turn?
The die was already cast—you chose in vain.

Is it piety that makes you feel so safe?
The mirror is dark; you pose in vain.

The lover's song falls on callous ears.
The nightingale serenades the rose in vain.

Is it you for whom the beloved waits?
Wake up! You're caught in passion's throes in vain.
.

by Sassan Tabatabai
from Uzunburun
The Pen & Anvil Press, Boston, 2011

Aaron David Miller in Foreign Policy:

There's no question that Obama understands and appreciates the special relationship between Israel and the United States. But Obama isn't Bill Clinton or George W. Bush when it comes to Israel — not even close. These guys were frustrated by Israeli prime ministers too, but they also were moved and enamored by them (Clinton by Yitzhak Rabin, Bush by Ariel Sharon). They had instinctive, heartfelt empathy for the idea of Israel's story, and as a consequence they could make allowances at times for Israel's behavior even when it clashed with their own policy goals. Obama is more like George H.W. Bush when it comes to Israel, but without a strategy.

If Obama is emotional when it comes to Israel, he's hiding it. Netanyahu obviously thinks he's bloodless. But then again, the U.S. president can be pretty reserved on a number of issues. Obama doesn't feel the need to be loved by the Israelis, and perhaps American Jews either. Combine that with a guy who's much more comfortable in gray than in black and white, and you have a president who sees Israel's world in much more nuanced terms, which is clearly hard for many Israelis and American Jews to accept. In Obama's mind, Israel has legitimate security needs, but it's also the strongest regional power. As a result, he believes that the Israelis should compromise on the peace process, give nonmilitary pressures against Iran time to work, and recognize that despite the uncertainties of the Arab Spring, now is the time to make peace with the Palestinians.

If Obama had a chance to reset the U.S.-Israel relationship and make it a little less special, he probably would. But I guess that's the point: He probably won't have the chance. If he gets a second term, he'll more than likely be faced with the same mix of Middle East headaches, conflicting priorities, narrow maneuvering room, and the swirl of domestic politics that bedevils him today. If the U.S. president fails to get an Israeli-Palestinian peace, it will be primarily because the Israelis, the Palestinians, and Barack Obama wouldn't pay the price, not because the pro-Israel community in America got in his way.

First, Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung in American Scientist:

The nonfiction publishing phenomenon known as Freakonomics has passed its sixth anniversary. The original book, which used ideas from statistics and economics to explore real-world problems, was an instant bestseller. By 2011, it had sold more than four million copies worldwide, and it has sprouted a franchise, which includes a bestselling sequel, SuperFreakonomics; an occasional column in the New York Times Magazine; a popular blog; and a documentary film. The word “freakonomics” has come to stand for a light-hearted and contrarian, yet rigorous and quantitative, way of looking at the world.

The faces of Freakonomics are Steven D. Levitt, an award-winning professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and Stephen J. Dubner, a widely published New York–based journalist. Levitt is celebrated for using data and statistics to solve an array of problems not typically associated with economics. Dubner has perfected the formula for conveying the excitement of Levitt’s research—and of the growing body of work by his collaborators and followers. On the heels of Freakonomics, the pop-economics or pop-statistics genre has attracted a surge of interest, with more authors adopting an anecdotal, narrative style.

Then a response by Stephen Dubner:

Given the nature of the Freakonomics work that Steve Levitt and I do, we get our fair share of critiques. Some are ideological or political; others are emotional.

We generally look over such critiques to see if they contain worthwhile feedback, or point to an error in need of correction. But for the most part, we tend to not reply to critiques. It seems only fair to let critics have their say (as writers, we’ve already had ours). Furthermore, spending one’s time responding to wayward attacks is the kind of chore you’d rather skip in order to get on with your work.

But occasionally an attack is so spectacularly ridiculous, so riddled with errors and mangled logic, that it’s worth addressing.

The following essay responds to two such attacks. The first one was relatively minor, a recent blog post written by a Yale professor. The second was more substantial, an essay by a pair of statisticians in American Scientist. Feel free to skip ahead to that one (at section III below), or buckle up for the whole bumpy ride.

Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber also jumps in.

Guy Gugliotta in Smithsonian Magazine:

Jonathan Bloch, a University of Florida paleontologist, and Jason Head, a paleontologist at the University of Nebraska, were crouched beneath a relentless tropical sun examining a set of Titanoboa remains with a Smithsonian Institution intern named Jorge Moreno-Bernal, who had discovered the fossil a few weeks earlier. All three were slathered with sunblock and carried heavy water bottles. They wore long-sleeved shirts and tramped around in heavy hiking boots on the shadeless moonscape whose ground cover was shaved away years ago by machinery.

“It’s probably an animal in the 30- to 35-foot range,” Bloch said of the new find, but size was not what he was thinking about. What had Bloch’s stomach aflutter on this brilliant Caribbean forenoon was lying in the shale five feet away.

“You just never find a snake skull, and we have one,” Bloch said. Snake skulls are made of several delicate bones that are not very well fused together. “When the animal dies, the skull falls apart,” Bloch explained. “The bones get lost.”

More here.

“It is perfectly true that ‘Jewish Writers in America’ (a repulsive category) missed what should have been for them the central event of their time, the destruction of European Jewry,” Saul Bellow wrote to Cynthia Ozick in 1987. “I can’t say how our responsibility can be assessed. We (I speak of Jews now and not merely of writers) should have reckoned more fully, more deeply with it.” Bellow’s quasi-confession suggests something of the perplexity that has always faced American Jewish novelists dealing with the Holocaust. (Though it is telling that Bellow prefers the formulation “Jewish Writers in America,” a way of gesturing to the fact that he himself is Canadian-born, and remained in some productive sense at an angle to the country that became his home and subject.) In earlier installments of Scripture, I have discussed novels that used a range of strategies for approaching this most necessary and impossible of subjects—from the epic realism of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate to the existential spareness of Elie Wiesel’s Night to the oblique character study of Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. What these Jewish writers had in common, however, is that they were to one degree or another directly touched by the Holocaust: It was the story of their own lives and communities.

more from Adam Kirsch at Tablet here.

The Freud wars are a bit like the current clamour that surrounds religion. Rancorous and obsessive in their pursuit of one another, the protagonists have no interest in securing agreement on the issues by which they claim to be divided. Though each side incessantly repeats that it is dedicated to rational inquiry, there is no argument that could conceivably settle what is humorously described as the debate. The nasty and occasionally sordid exchanges – which in the case of the Freud wars have at times involved legal action – serve interests other than those that are avowed by the participants, though what these interests may be is often unclear. A feature of both disputations is that the same issues are tirelessly replayed, generation after generation. The battle lines of the Freud wars were drawn early in the twentieth century, with Karl Popper formulating his argument, sometime around 1919, that psychoanalytical interpretations cannot be scientific because they cannot be falsified; he later attacked psychoanalysis in these same terms in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and Conjectures and Refutations (1963).

more from John Gray at Literary Review here.

Our own Morgan Meis in Killing the Buddha:

They call it the Pearl of the Indian Ocean, this island of Sri Lanka. But you could just as well call it Religion Island. There are no less than four major religions practiced here, and that doesn’t count the people in villages that make offerings to the local tree gods. Buddhists dominate the religious landscape, but there are Hindus and Muslims and Christians in abundance. I’ve heard that over 98 percent of this island’s population consists of active worshippers of one religion or another. My wife and I have been living here for the last four months, and from our home outside of Colombo, the capital city, you can hear the rites of the local Buddhist temples being performed early in the mornings and late at night. On full moon nights, processions of white-clad worshippers wind through the poorly paved roads. This is far from a godless place.

It was with some anticipation, then, that those of us inhabiting Religion Island awaited the coming of Richard Dawkins. His book The God Delusion is, after all, meant to be the definitive scientific debunking of religion for our time. Dawkins came to attend the Sixth Annual Galle Literary Festival, which was started by an English ex-pat named Geoffrey Dobbs and has become a major stopping point for international literary types.

More here. [Photo shows Morgan moderating a discussion at the festival.]

Now that The Artist has whetted our interest in the silent film and the revolutionary impact of sound, it may be time to reconsider the career of the man who made the conversion to sound the basis of a whole new kind of movie, Fred Astaire. The Artist suggests quite accurately that the definitive event of the new sound era was the arrival of the film musical. Sound meant music; music meant jazz. But the technological transition was slow. After the first feature-length sound movie, The Jazz Singer (1927), which starred Al Jolson, it was six years before the advent of the Jazz Dancer proved that talking and even singing mouths were not nearly as expressive in the new medium as dancing feet, especially and almost exclusively the feet of Fred Astaire. Astaire and the difference he made to the film musical add up to more than the story of one career. No other film genre provided as perfect a synchronization of sight and sound or an experience as exhilarating, and that was very largely Astaire’s doing.

more from Arlene Croce at the NYRB here.

From Salon:

“Obama Begs U.S. Not to Embarrass Him in Front of French,” read the Onion headline during last year’s state visit by Nicholas Sarkozy. Once again, the fake newspaper got the real story: Americans tend to feel that whatever we do, the French do it better, or at least cooler. French women, a popular weight loss guide has it, don’t get fat. A recent Wall Street Journal article caused a sensation by explaining why French children are better behaved and more self-sufficient than American children. And of course, when it comes to love and sex, the French are our touchstone for sophistication: just compare the Lewinsky affair to the funeral of François Mitterand, where his wife and mistress stood side by side.

“The Paradox of Love,” the latest book-length essay by the prominent French intellectual Pascal Bruckner, confirms most of these American assumptions about France. Among the many subjects of Bruckner’s highly readable meditation is a section titled “Europe, the United States: Different Taboos,” in which he marvels at the parade of American sex scandals — Clarence Thomas, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer. All this “strikes French people as grotesque,” Bruckner writes. “On the moral level… one can only urge Americans to learn from the Old World how to be temperate.” Yet Bruckner also suggests that all is not entirely well with the French libido, either. It is not a coincidence that the most famous living French writer, Michel Houellebecq, got that way by writing novels full of sexual despair, in which unattractive men, edged out of sexual competition, patronize prostitutes or succumb to sheer nihilism. Bruckner confirms that there is indeed a “paradox” about today’s laissez-faire sexual mores in Europe: The freedom it offers is exactly the freedom of the market, in which there are always winners and losers. “Rejection is so terrible in democratic countries because it cannot be blamed on the wickedness of the state or ukases issued by a church. If I am not received with open arms, I have only myself to blame; I may be dying of desire, but it is my being as such that leaves the other person cold. The judgment is as final as one handed down by a court: no thanks, not you.”

More here.

From Science:

When it's time to settle in for the night, red postman butterflies (Heliconius erato) often roost in groups of four or five. To figure out why, researchers hung several thousand fake versions of the insects around the forest in Panama and Costa Rica. To measure bird attacks, they counted beak marks on the dummies' modeling-clay bodies and wax-coated paper wings. Individuals perched alone or in pairs were more than six times as likely to be attacked as were models perched in groups of five. The effect went beyond a simple sharing of risk among group members: Each roost of five, considered as a unit, was less likely than a singleton to experience an attack, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The researchers argue that the butterflies' bright markings, which advertise their toxicity to predators, are more effective when amplified in a group.

More here.

Bat Soup

But it’s diluted with sky, not water,
the aerial plankton on which they sup.
Our solitary pipistrelle flickers
over her chosen suburban quarter,
echo-locating, to siphon it up.
It nourishes birds as well as bats –
high-flyers that feed on the wing,
swifts, house-martins – this floating gruel
of hymenoptera, midges and gnats,
thunderbugs, beetles, aphids, flies,
moths, mosquitoes, and flying dots
almost too small to be worth naming.
Some of it swirls at a lower level –
a broth of midges over a pool
at dusk or a simultaneous hatch
of mayflies boiling up from Lough Neagh:
swallow-fodder, and also a splotch
to plaster on any passing windscreen,
though even at speed there’s never so much
as of yore; bad news for the food-chain,
but somehow ‘où sont les neiges d’antan’
sounds too noble a note of dole
for a sullying mash of blood and chitin.
(And we can’t hear what the bats are screaming.)

by Fleur Adcock
from Glass Wings
publisher: Bloodaxe, Newcastle, 2013

From CNN:

It is not possible to dial an Iranian number from an Israeli telephone. It will simply not go through. That lack of communication stems from the government level, where there is no dialogue between the two countries aside from public speeches meant to carry weighty threats of war to each camp.

That is why it was so difficult for Ronny Edry, an Israeli graphic designer based in Tel Aviv, to get his message across to the people of Iran.

“My idea was simple, I was trying to reach the other side. There are all these talks about war, Iran is coming to bomb us and we bomb them back, we are sitting and waiting. I wanted to say the simple words that this war is crazy,” said Edry.

Using his graphic design skills and his wife's help (she is also a graphic designer), he plastered memes over pictures of himself, his wife, his friends and his neighbors. He then posted them on the Facebook page of Pushpin Mehina, his small design school, with a resounding message:

IRANIANS, we will never bomb your country, We *Heart* You.

The response, said Edry, was overwhelming. “In a few hours, I had hundreds of shares and thousands of likes and it was like something was happening.

More here. And the Iranian response: “Israel, we love you too!”:

“My Israeli friends, I do not hate you; I do not want war. love, Peace,” read many Iranian posters that were posted by Iranians to the new group page. Most of the Iranians, who posted messages to the Facebook group, did so with their faces partially veiled, probably out of fear from the Iranian authorities. On Saturday, Edry said that Iranian group members explained that they could be arrested if recognized in the photos.

“Dear Israeli Friends and World! Iranians love peace and we hate hate!…and we don't need any Nuclear Power to show it!” one poster caption stated.

“I’m from Iran and love your idea and your efforts against war and for peace. I am really happy to get to know you and people like you, and hope to find more people like you. Here in Iran the situation is complicated and many people hate the governments and their bullshit,” another anonymous Iranian wrote in a poster he published.

More here.

This LSE study argues that it is very unlikely. From the Intro by Ramachandra Guha:

Superficially, India seems to have travelled a long way from the summer of 1948. Now – despite the dissensions in the borderlands, in Kashmir and the north-east – it is clear that India is and will be a single country, whose leaders shall be chosen by (and also replaced by) its people. Indians no longer fear for our existence as a sovereign nation or as a functioning democracy. What we hope for instead is a gradual enhancement of our material and political powers, and the acknowledgement of our nation as one of the most powerful and respected on earth.

But, the more things appear to change, the more they are actually the same. For today, the Indian state once more faces a challenge from left-wing extremism. The Prime Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh, has identified the Communist Party of India (Maoist), known more familiarly as the Naxalites, as the ‘greatest internal security threat‘ facing the nation. The Home Ministry lists more than 150 districts as being ‘Naxalite affected’. This is an exaggeration, for with even one single, stray incident, a State Government is moved to get a district listed under that category, so as to garner more funds from the Central treasury. Still, the Naxalites do have a considerable presence in some forty or fifty districts spread out over the central and eastern parts of the country. Their greatest gains have been among tribal communities treated with contempt and condescension by the Indian state and by the formal processes of Indian democracy.

The conventional wisdom is that the erstwhile Untouchables, or Dalits, are the social group who are most victimised in India. In fact, the tribals fare even worse. In a recent book, the demographer Arun Maharatna compared the life chances of an average Dalit with that of an average tribal. On all counts the tribals were found to be more disadvantaged. As many as 41.5 percent of Dalits live below the official poverty line; however, the proportion of poor tribal households is even higher, at 49.5 percent. One-in-six Dalits have no access to doctors or health clinics; as many as one-in-four tribals suffer from the same disability.

From The New York Times:

In today’s world of Apple, Google and Facebook, the name may not ring any bells for most readers, but for decades — from the 1920s through the 1980s — Bell Labs, the research and development wing of AT&T, was the most innovative scientific organization in the world. As Jon Gertner argues in his riveting new book, “The Idea Factory,” it was where the future was invented.

Indeed, Bell Labs was behind many of the innovations that have come to define modern life, including the transistor (the building block of all digital products), the laser, the silicon solar cell and the computer operating system called Unix (which would serve as the basis for a host of other computer languages). Bell Labs developed the first communications satellites, the first cellular telephone systems and the first fiber-optic cable systems. The Bell Labs scientist Claude Elwood Shannon effectively founded the field of information theory, which would revolutionize thinking about communications; other Bell Labs researchers helped push the boundaries of physics, chemistry and mathematics, while defining new industrial processes like quality control. In “The Idea Factory,” Mr. Gertner — an editor at Fast Company magazine and a writer for The New York Times Magazine — not only gives us spirited portraits of the scientists behind Bell Labs’ phenomenal success, but he also looks at the reasons that research organization became such a fount of innovation, laying the groundwork for the networked world we now live in.

More here.

From Nature:

Why a U.S. Army soldier suspected of killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan did what he did is still unclear, but one thing is certain: his lawyers are likely to invoke emerging science about the effects of war on the brain to aid in his defense. In fact, even before Staff Sgt. Robert Bales' identity was revealed, unnamed US officials were telling major news outlets that the suspect had suffered a traumatic brain injury, or TBI. Shortly thereafter, Bales’ lawyer publicly suggested that his client suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), even though it does not appear to have been previously diagnosed.

How much either TBI or PTSD could explain a pre-planned rampage is up for debate, however. According to Dr. James Giordano, director of the Center for Neurotechnology Studies at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Virginia, TBI manifests itself through a variety of complaints, which may range from mild to moderate. These could include disorientation, ringing in the ears, vertigo, and headaches, as well as a more profound constellation of severe neurological and psychological symptoms, such as impaired impulse control, acting out and aggressive behavior. “What we're seeing is that TBI presents as spectrum disorder with a variety of effects,” says Giordano. In fact, some people make a complete recovery from TBI, while others develop more severe conditions down the road, and it’s difficult to predict which injuries will persist, according to Giordano. “One would think the milder the injury, the less severe the symptoms,” says Giordano. “That’s not always the case.” The Pentagon estimates that over 230,000 troops have suffered some form of TBI over the past 10 years.

More here.

Claire Jarvis in Paper Momument:

In “I, Heidi, Take Thee, Spencer,” the final episode of the fourth season of MTVs glossy quasi-reality show The Hills, antagonist Heidi Montag (flighty and airbrushed, surgically enhanced, blonde) reaches out to the program’s protagonist, her onetime “best friend” Lauren Conrad (given to seriousness and heavy eye makeup, less obviously surgically enhanced, blonde). The conversation shifts from the sentimentally banal (they “miss each other,” but things “are what they are”) to the absurd; in one oddball moment, Heidi, incapable of turning off the LA body-flattery she’s absorbed over the past few years, asks Lauren, “Have you been working out a lot?” Still, the intensity of this attempted reconciliation is larded with pathos. Never mind that this pair’s enmity has outlasted its friendship by a good two MTV “years,” or that their “reconciliation” has been prompted only by their simultaneous attendance at one of the many “young Hollywood” parties that litter the program’s mise-en-scène (Heidi is “working” as a functionary for an event-planning firm; Lauren, in one of the program’s neverending assertions of hierarchy, is a valued “guest”). No, The Hills accords the event a full measure of dignity, embedding the minimal dialogue in a choreography of meaningful glances and unspeakable sentences: Is this a soap opera or a Henry James novel?

The encounter’s signal moment—a clue to the show’s novel depiction of time—arrives when Heidi asks:

[sighing] Don’t you feel, like, you’re, like, eighteen again, nineteen? I feel like I don’t really get older, time just keeps, like, passing by. And I’m like wait, like, two years ago, three years ago seems, like, five minutes ago, so much.

Heidi’s awkwardly telescopic nostalgia (in which two or three years can feel like five minutes) reminds us that The Hills happens in both television time and “real” time. Over the years, Heidi participates in the bildungsroman of contemporary America—leaving home, getting a job, making consequential life decisions along the way, like everyone else in the real world. Unlike Heidi, though, most people in similar circumstances mark their aging all too clearly: time marches on, and the shift from teenager to adult comes with the attendant discovery that life is not endless. But that’s only part of Heidi’s complaint. More centrally, Heidi’s perception of temporal dissonance shows how parceled her existence has become over the past several years—fit into five-minute segments for mass-market consumption. With this partitioning, MTV conditions the viewers, and possibly Heidi herself, to think of Heidi Montag as “Heidi Montag.” As the program overlays a novelistic plot arc on Heidi’s life, it also impresses it with an unchanging Californian ambience, one patterned on the many fictional Californias of film and television, polished for home viewing. Things unarguably happen on The Hills, but Heidi’s right: on this show, three years ago is the same as the present moment. How can a show so preoccupied with marking the passage from youth to adulthood seem so listlessly static? And why is this listlessness so fascinating to watch?