Eric Michael Johnson in his blog The Primate Diaries at Scientific American:

Johnson: When you were first developing your voice as a writer, who were some of your most important influences? I know you were particularly fond of Melville and Faulkner as an undergrad at Yale. What did studying literature offer for developing your own style compared to the work of other science writers?

Zimmer: At the time I was reading Melville, Faulkner, or Mark Twain, I had vague ideas about writing fiction. That was my initial impetus for reading them. Gradually I realized that I was actually more interested in the natural world. It was at that point I began to appreciate really good science writing. I was reading people like Jonathan Weiner, John McPhee, or David Quammen, writers who could construct a sentence that left you breathless. But it was very important for me to have had that different experience in reading beforehand. It taught me how important it is to tell a story when you’re writing as well as all the different ways you can tell that story. These are elements you can bring into science writing to great effect.

The fact is there is a lot of science writing in great literature. I’m a big fan of Moby Dick, for example. Melville’s novel is probably a quarter to a third science writing. It’s the story of an obsessed captain going after a whale interspersed with long passages about marine biology, paleontology, even consciousness. It’s all science. But he writes about it in a style that can be quite humbling. When you read it you see how beautiful someone can make these descriptions of the natural world. I’ve always been frustrated with the flatness of a lot of science writing. I think that science writers should try to aim high rather than going for a lot of these clichés you often see both in magazines and in books.

More here.

Nicolette Hahn Niman in The Atlantic:

As Americans gather around holiday tables this year, many of us will be setting places for vegetarians and vegans. In some families, diverse diets co-exist peacefully. In others, well … maybe there's a health-obsessed uncle who relishes warning that “Meat will kill you!” Or an idealistic college student, eager to regale her complacent elders with grim details of the cruelty and environmental damage wrought by factory farms. Or omnivores who resent the suggestion that they should worry — or feel guilty — about eating meat.

The three of us can relate to both sides of such discussions. Though reared by omnivorous families, as young adults we each came to the conclusion that meat was to blame for health problems, environmental destruction, and cruelty to animals. Collectively, we have lived 52 years vegan or vegetarian. Yet we no longer think that vegetarianism is the answer to these ills. Now — as a rancher, a hunter, and a butcher — we firmly believe foods from animals can be healthful, environmentally appropriate, and ethical.

More here.

Inspired by Andrew Sullivan's use of Urtak's reader-driven poll, I thought I'd start one here on 3QD, just to know a little more about our readers, and to help readers know a little more about each other. If you want to add a question, feel free. You will have to create a Urtak account or sign in via facebook or twitter. Have fun. (UPDATE: If you don't want to go through the hassle of signing up in order to pose a question to your fellow readers, just pose it in the comments and I will add it to the widget, provided it's a reasonable question.)

3QD readers ask and answer questions

A friend comments, “[I]n the past 72 hours we've gone from obsequy to backlash to satire.” Neal Pollack in Salon:

University, as you know, is the only time in one’s life when anything really worthwhile happens. I met Hitch there. The first time I saw him, he had a bird on each arm and a woman by his side. She beamed as he read aloud passages from “Homage to Catalonia.” He looked up.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

“I’m your housemate,” I said.

“Are you in favor of the war in Vietnam?”

“Of course not.”

Hitch put down the book and took a swig of cheap Scotch.

“Good,” he said. “Because I refuse to fraternize with men who are afraid to be intellectual heroes.”

In the annals of history, only Orwell, Voltaire and maybe a half-dozen other guys could match’s Hitch ideological bravery and breadth of political knowledge. In 1977, after I’d returned to his graces by aiding him in a plot to assassinate Henry Kissinger’s character, Hitch and I visited Borges’ library in Buenos Aires. At the time, Hitch was working for the KGB while pretending to work for the BBC, and I was working for the Mossad while pretending to work for Burger King. But our many identities were merely covers for our lives as political writers at low-paying magazines.

Ahdaf Soueif in The Guardian:

The woman is young, and slim, and fair. She lies on her back surrounded by four soldiers, two of whom are dragging her by the arms raised above her head. She's unresisting – maybe she's fainted; we can't tell because we can't see her face. She's wearing blue jeans and trainers. But her top half is bare: we can see her torso, her tummy, her blue bra, her bare delicate arms. Surrounding this top half, forming a kind of black halo around it, is the abaya, the robe she was wearing that has been ripped off and that tells us that she was wearing a hijab.

Six years ago, when popular protests started to hit the streets of Egypt as Hosni Mubarak's gang worked at rigging the 2005 parliamentary elections, the regime hit back – not just with the traditional Central Security conscripts – but with an innovation: militias of strong, trained, thugs. They beat up men, but they grabbed women, tore their clothes off and beat them, groping them at the same time. The idea was to insinuate that females who took part in street protests wanted to be groped.

Women developed deterrent techniques: layers of light clothing, no buttons, drawstring pants double-knotted – and carried right on protesting. Many of the smaller civil initiatives that grew into the protest movement: “We See You”, “Against Corruption”, “The Streets are Ours” were women-led.

But, a symbiotic relationship springs up between behaviours. Mubarak and Omar Suleiman turn Egypt into the US's favourite location for the torture of “terror suspects” and torture becomes endemic in police stations. The regime's thugs molest women as a form of political bullying – and harassment of women in the streets rises to epidemic levels.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

A team of Italian researchers at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome have discovered that this molecule, called CREB1, is triggered by “caloric restriction” (low caloric diet) in the brain of mice. They found that CREB1 activates many genes linked to longevity and to the proper functioning of the brain. This work was led by Giovambattista Pani, researcher at the Institute of General Pathology, Faculty of Medicine at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome, directed by Professor Achille Cittadini, in collaboration with Professor Claudio Grassi of the Institute of Human Physiology. The research appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “Our hope is to find a way to activate CREB1, for example through new drugs, so to keep the brain young without the need of a strict diet,” Dr Pani said.

Caloric restriction means the animals can only eat up to 70 percent of the food they consume normally, and is a known experimental way to extend life, as seen in many experimental models. Typically, caloric-restricted mice do not become obese and don't develop diabetes; moreover they show greater cognitive performance and memory, are less aggressive. Furthermore they do not develop, if not much later, Alzheimer's disease and with less severe symptoms than in overfed animals.

More here.

Ten or twelve years ago, when I was visiting Berlin, Stan Persky took me to see Cranach the Elder’s painting of the Fountain of Youth at the Gemäldegalerie. It is a medium-sized canvas that depicts, in excruciating detail, a rectangular swimming pool seen in perspective full of happily cavorting men and women. Old people are arriving from the left in carts and wheelbarrows; youths emerge naked from the other side where a series of red tents await them, like those bathing-machines of which Lewis Carroll’s Snark was so inordinately fond. The Cranach painting led Stan and me into a discussion on whether we would like to extend the time of our lives, if such a thing were possible. I said that the foreseeable end did not frighten or worry me; on the contrary, I liked the idea of living with a conclusion in mind, and compared an immortal life to an endless book which, however charming, would end up seeming tiresome. Stan, however, argued that living on, perhaps forever (provided he were free of sickness and infirmities), would be an excellent thing. Life, he said, was so enjoyable that he never wanted it to end.

more from Alberto Manguel at Threepenny Review here.

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

The scientists, at the University of Oxford in England, looked at the evolutionary family tree of 217 primate species whose social organization is known. Their findings, published in the journal Nature, challenge some of the leading theories of social behavior, including:

¶ That social structure is shaped by environment — for instance, a species whose food is widely dispersed may need to live in large groups.

¶ That complex societies evolve step by step from simple ones.

¶ And the so-called social brain hypothesis: that intelligence and brain volume increase with group size because individuals must manage more social relationships.

By contrast, the new survey emphasizes the major role of genetics in shaping sociality. Being rooted in genetics, social structure is hard to change, and a species has to operate with whatever social structure it inherits. If social behavior were mostly shaped by ecology, then related species living in different environments should display a variety of social structures. But the Oxford biologists — Susanne Shultz, Christopher Opie and Quentin Atkinson — found the opposite was true: Primate species tended to have the same social structure as their close relatives, regardless of how and where they live.

More here.

“It's when your head's turned inattentively,
just slightly, in belief that inattention comes
to swallow you whole.” —Alain Bischford

Talith

We sleep beneath your grandfather’s talith
Fine lamb’s wool striped black and white
A giant barcode to be scanned by God
The pelt of a fabulous beast.

Little tent, portable temple
It survived Dutch looters and Dublin landlords
To shelter in this Irish night even me
Uncircumcised, and all too often, unwashed.

Your father pinned it to his study wall
A flag without a shield. Eternity’s quilt,
Your grandfather didn’t think he’d need it
When he took the train in Amsterdam.

“And what,” he mocked your father,
“are they going to murder us all?”

by Michael O’Loughlin
from In This Life
publisher: New Island, Dublin, 2011

Just after the election of 2008, the Nobel laureate liberal economist Paul Krugman made a prophecy: we will not restore prosperity, he warned in The New York Review of Books, “unless we are willing to think clearly about our problems and to follow those thoughts wherever they lead.” But as Krugman’s thoughts drifted back to the maxims of John Maynard Keynes—maxims he called “more relevant than ever”—our thoughts could be turning to the older and in some respects wiser innovations of President Lincoln and the Republican Congress during the Civil War. Here’s the gist of it: using the monetary methods of Lincoln, updated to employ the inflation-fighting tools of the Federal Reserve, we could pay for a faster recovery and a great many worthy projects without higher taxes, without more national debt, and believe it or not, without inflation. How? By letting Congress exercise a little-known power that is used (very quietly indeed) by the Federal Reserve: the power to create new money.

more from Richard Striner at The American Scholar here.

Mocked and ridiculed, the 1980s met a pitiful end at the hands of a generation of artists who considered a market-friendly, object-based art their ideological nemesis, and punished it summarily for its false richness. This is an exaggeration, of course, but ask around in my (Northern European) corner of the world, and I would guess that many of those who were working back then will confirm this picture of a generational showdown. By contrast, faded and forgotten as they may be, ‘the long nineties’ remain unsubverted.1 The symbolic revival of Félix Gonzáles-Torres at the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, for instance, echoed his status as a guiding star of curating and art theory of that decade. However, during the last five years, as the historicization of the ’90s gains momentum, the jury has gradually reconvened. The case being weighed is that of art’s relationship to the social.

more from Lars Bang Larsen at Frieze here.

John Adams in the New York Times Book Review:

That a glamorous movie star whose day job involved hours of makeup calls and dress fittings would spend her off hours designing sophisticated weapons systems is one of the great curiosities of Hollywood history. Lamarr, however, not only possessed a head for abstract spatial relationships, but she also had been in her former life a fly on the wall during meetings and technical discussions between her ­munitions-manufacturer husband and his clients, some of them Nazi officials. Disturbed by news reports of innocents killed at sea by U-boats, she was determined to help defeat the German attacks. And Ant­heil, arguably the most mechanically inclined of all composers, having long before mastered the byzantine mechanisms of pneumatic piano rolls, retained a special genius for “out of the box” problem ­solving.

Over several years the composer and the movie star spent countless hours together drafting and redrafting designs, not only for the torpedo system but also for a “proximity fuse” antiaircraft shell. In reality, their patent was an early version of today’s smart bombs. The device as they made it employed a constantly roving radio signal to guide the torpedo toward its target. Because the signal kept “hopping” from one frequency to another, it would be impossible for the enemy to lock onto. To solve the problems of synchronizing receiver and transmitter, Ant­heil proposed a tiny structure inspired by the workings of a piano roll. This was a feat that years later would be used in everything from cellphone and Bluetooth technology to GPS instruments.

More here.

…and that’s a good thing. Now the Saudi innovator is doing work that could save millions of lives in the developing world—and launching her own Mideast foundation.

Abigail Pesta in The Daily Beast:

Stephen M. Walt has picked the winners:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Kenan Malik, Rethinking the Idea of “Christian Europe”
2. Strange Quark, $300: David Graeber, On the Invention of Money
3. Charm Quark, $200: Corey Robin, Revolutionaries of the Right: The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism

Here is what Professor Walt had to say about them:

Picking three winners from the nine impressive finalists was not an easy task. In judging the different selections, I looked for writing that combined clarity and verve and made a topic of enduring interest come alive. Did the author help the reader see connections previously unnoticed, or bring into sharp relief a phenomenon that had been forgotten or misunderstood? Did the article advance a novel argument with such force that even skeptical readers might be convinced? That is the essential feature of deep analysis and sharp writing: it forces us to question our prior beliefs and see the world anew. Each of the nine nominees succeeded in considerable measure, but for me, these three stood out.

#1 Top Quark: Kenan Malik, “Rethinking the Idea of 'Christian Europe',” Pandaemonium (August 12, 2011).

Soldiers in today’s culture wars believe “European civilization” rests on a set of unchanging principles that are perennially under siege—from godless communism, secular humanism, and most recently, radical Islam. For many of these zealots, what makes the “West” unique are its Judeo-Christian roots. In this calm and elegantly-written reflection on the past two millenia, Malik shows that Christianity is only one of the many sources of “Western” culture, and that many of the ideas we now think of as “bedrock” values were in fact borrowed from other cultures. This essay is a potent antidote to those who believe a “clash of civilizations” is inevitable—if not already underway—and the moral in Malik’s account could not be clearer. Openness to outside influences has been the true source of European prominence; erecting ramparts against others will impoverish and endanger us all.

#2 Strange Quark: David Graeber: “On the Invention of Money – Notes on Sex, Adventure, Monomaniacal Sociopathy and the True Function of Economics,” naked capitalism.com (September 13, 2011).

Where did money come from? Graeber takes the standard economists' explanation–dating back to Adam Smith–and leaves it (and a few of its defenders) in shards. Instead of simply assuming that money emerged from the process of barter (as economists are wont to do), Graeber marshals an array of anthropological evidence demonstrating that money first arose as a means of account within non-state bureaucracies (such as Sumerian religious temples). It’s a tour de force of sustained argumentation, leavened by incisive writing and deadly flashes of wit, and it tells you a lot about how social science ought to be done (but often isn’t).

#3 Charm Quark: Corey Robin, “Revolutionaries on the Right: the Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism,” www.coreyrobin.com (September 27, 2011).

Why are today's so-called “conservatives” so enamored of far-reaching social and political transformations, not to mention costly and ill-fated efforts to export “liberty” at the barrel of a gun? Far from being traitors to true conservatism, Robin argues that today's conservative radicals are drawing upon a tradition of discourse dating back to Edmund Burke’s fear that established orders cannot generate the passion and commitment needed to vanquish revolutionary movements. To defeat Jacobinism and its various revolutionary successors, in short, die-hard “conservatives” have to fight fire with fire. And from these deep roots arises a “conservatism” that takes no prisoners and leaves few traditions unscathed. It is the “conservatism” of NSC-68 (which told Cold Warriors not to shrink “from any means, overt or covert, that could frustrate the Kremlin’s design”), of the Patriot Act, and of today’s drone wars and targeted killings. It takes real imagination to help us see Burke afresh, and Robin provides it here.

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (I will send the prize money later today or tomorrow–and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today–just send me an email). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Stephen M. Walt for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed by me (top and strange) and Sughra Raza (charm). I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

Stow Wengenroth. Shadow of The Elm. 1946.

Lithograph.

More here and here.

Malise Ruthven reviews Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest by Hamid Dabashi in the New York Review of Books:

In 2004, anticipating the victory of the Shiite parties in the Iraqi parliamentary elections, King Abdullah of Jordan warned of a “Shiite crescent” stretching from Iran into Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon that would be dominated by Iran with its large majority of Shias and Shiite clerical leadership. The idea was picked up by the Saudi foreign minister, who described the US intervention in Iraq as a “handover of Iraq to Iran” since the US was supporting mainly Shiite groups there after overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s Sunni regime. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt claimed that Shias residing in Arab countries were more loyal to Iran than to their own governments. In an Op-Ed published in The Washington Post in November 2006, Nawaf Obaid, national security adviser to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, reflected on the urgent need to support Iraq’s Sunni minority, which had lost power after centuries of ruling over a Shiite majority comprising more than 65 percent of the Iraqi population.

Shiaphobia is nothing new for Saudi Arabia. The kingdom’s legitimacy derives from the Wahhabi sect of Islam, a Sunni Muslim group that attacked Shiite shrines in Iraq in the nineteenth century, and today systematically discriminates against Shias. We know from WikiLeaks that the US government regards the Saudi monarchy as a “critical financial support base” for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and other terrorist groups. As well as attacking American and Indian targets, all these are violently anti-Shiite. We also know that the Saudi king venomously urged his US allies to cut off the “head of the snake” by attacking Shiite Iran.

More here.

Shalini Nair in Indian Express:

The nondescript apartment looks like an average home in Karachi. It’s the bar of Chandrika herbal soap in the bathroom and the Mathrubhoomi calendar on the wall, ubiquitous to Malayali homes, that betrays the lineage of its occupants. The flat’s octogenarian owner, BM Kutty, came to Karachi from Kerala in search of greener pastures in 1949, a time when Karachi was just a train ride away from Mumbai. Since then, the political activist has spent six decades of his life as a Pakistani national.

Kutty is part of the shrinking community of Malayalis settled in Karachi. Unlike some Muslims of north India who migrated to Pakistan during Partition, the migration of Malayali Muslims had a different context. The first exodus from Kerala to Karachi took place in 1921, the year of the Mappila Revolt, when landless Malabar Muslims (Mappilas) of Malappuram district in north Kerala launched an armed rebellion against the British and upper-caste Hindus. The uprising was brutally crushed after the British proclaimed martial law, and the Karachi chapter of Mappilas was born.

More here.

Justin Smith in Lapham's Quarterly (image from Wikimedia commons):

Whether to denounce it as a step down the path to unspeakable decadence or to exalt it as self-evidently right and just, everyone in public life today has a position on gay marriage. All the presidential candidates in the current electoral cycle have been asked about it, and all have had responses carefully packaged to ingratiate themselves with their constituencies. If the past few years may serve as a guide, it is likely that in the coming elections the subtle middle will be thoroughly excluded, as candidates and voters alike flock to one of two opposite poles: either holding that “marriage is between a man and a woman,” or, on the contrary, that everyone has an equal right to marriage. These are thought-arresting platitudes; they are not articulate positions, nor even the rudiments of arguments for such positions. The greatest problem with both is their brash confidence in the moral abhorrence or necessity of gay marriage, absent any historical or critical interest in the nature of marriage itself.

The rise of gay marriage, I believe, has played an important role in reinforcing naturalism about marriage, and thus in buttressing the conservative cause, at just that moment in history—the decades following the sexual revolution—when the contingency of marriage began to show through and its role as the basic building block of society came to be called into question. Pervading the arguments for marriage equality made by eloquent defenders such as Andrew Sullivan is the idea that gay marriage will not, as the conservatives fear, cause us to lose our moral bearings, so much as it will bring gays into the fold of a single gay-straight community of shared moral values. Over the past fifteen years, the liberal mainstream has begun to move toward this view. But Sullivan is, in the end, a conservative himself, and it is one of the great wonders of the past few decades of public debate that his conservative argument has won over so many who otherwise despise this political orientation. The same people who claim to dislike talk of family values will defend gay marriage on the grounds that it contributes to the strengthening of those values.