From The Telegraph:

Loudness isn’t all bad and silence can be deathly. A padded cell would be more terrifying than the roar over Heathrow, and deafness is well known to be more alienating than blindness. Noise is invigorating: it wakes us up and warns us of danger. There are millions like Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel who delight in turning the volume up to 11 as they listen to heavy metal and hip hop.

Mother Nature seems to agree: she abhors silence. The explosion of Krakatoa was heard 3,000 miles away, and the peace of the countryside is an urban myth: rushing water, the dawn chorus, mating animals or a storm are far noisier than the hum of traffic. Another myth is the peace of the past. Blacksmiths, horses’ hooves on cobbles and hawkers made a filthy racket in the pre-industrial city. Whenever I am tempted to rip that wretched iPod from a teenage ear, I remind myself of the ghetto-blasters and transistor radios a generation ago. Manual typewriters clattered far louder than computer keyboards. Yet noise is a terrible problem in the modern world, and one salutes both George Prochnik and Garret Keizer for proselytising on behalf of a bit more hush. Although they both write from the United States, the noisiest country in the world, and inevitably cover a lot of the same ground, their approaches are different and complementary.

Morehere.

From The New York Times:

Monica Long had expected a routine appointment. But here she was sitting in her new oncologist’s office, and he was delivering deeply disturbing news. Nearly a year earlier, in 2007, a pathologist at a small hospital in Cheboygan, Mich., had found the earliest stage of breast cancer from a biopsy. Extensive surgery followed, leaving Ms. Long’s right breast missing a golf-ball-size chunk. Now she was being told the pathologist had made a mistake. Her new doctor was certain she never had the disease, called ductal carcinoma in situ, or D.C.I.S. It had all been unnecessary — the surgery, the radiation, the drugs and, worst of all, the fear. “Psychologically, it’s horrible,” Ms. Long said. “I never should have had to go through what I did.” Like most women, Ms. Long had regarded the breast biopsy as the gold standard, an infallible way to identify cancer. “I thought it was pretty cut and dried,” said Ms. Long, who is a registered nurse.

As it turns out, diagnosing the earliest stage of breast cancer can be surprisingly difficult, prone to both outright error and case-by-case disagreement over whether a cluster of cells is benign or malignant, according to an examination of breast cancer cases by The New York Times. Advances in mammography and other imaging technology over the past 30 years have meant that pathologists must render opinions on ever smaller breast lesions, some the size of a few grains of salt. Discerning the difference between some benign lesions and early stage breast cancer is a particularly challenging area of pathology, according to medical records and interviews with doctors and patients.

More here.

What exactly is a living room? Is it a formal room for special occasions, or a casual space for everyday life? The meaning has been unclear ever since the late 17th century, when architects first considered what “living” in the home meant. In 1691, in the first edition of what was to become a hugely influential architectural manual, “Lessons of Architecture,” Charles Augustin d’Aviler drew a distinction between formal display spaces and a new kind of room, spaces that were “less grand.” D’Aviler used an unusual phrase to describe these new rooms: “le plus habité” — literally the most lived in. This marked the first time that an architect discussed the notion of living rooms, rooms intended for everyday life. Before this, anyone who could afford an architect-designed residence wanted it to serve as proof of status and wealth; almost all rooms were display spaces. But once d’Aviler opened the door, French architects began making rooms for specific activities of daily life integral to the design of the home: initially the bedroom, then dressing rooms and bathrooms. These “less grand” rooms were the original living rooms.

more from Joan Dejean at The Opinionater here.

It may sound like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, but an academic at the University of Manchester claims to have cracked a mathematical and musical code in the works of Plato. Jay Kennedy, a historian and philosopher of science, described his findings as “like opening a tomb and discovering new works by Plato.” Plato is revealed to be a Pythagorean who understood the basic structure of the universe to be mathematical, anticipating the scientific revolution of Galileo and Newton by 2,000 years. Kennedy’s breakthrough, published in the journal Apeiron this week, is based on stichometry: the measure of ancient texts by standard line lengths. Kennedy used a computer to restore the most accurate contemporary versions of Plato’s manuscripts to their original form, which would consist of lines of 35 characters, with no spaces or punctuation. What he found was that within a margin of error of just one or two percent, many of Plato’s dialogues had line lengths based on round multiples of twelve hundred.

more from Julian Baggini at The Guardian here.

There are all sorts of things very poor people living in poor countries don’t have. They lack secondary-school educations, usually, and good medical care. They lack steady work and life insurance, bank accounts and competent legal representation, adequate fertilizer for their crops, adequate protein in their diets, reliable electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, low-interest loans, incubators for their premature babies, vaccinations and good schools for their children. But the central thing they lack is money. That is what makes them, by definition, poor: International aid organizations define the “very poor” as those who live on less than a dollar a day. Despite this, the global fight that governments and nongovernmental organizations have waged against poverty in the developing world has focused almost entirely on changing the conditions in which the poor live, through dams and bridges and other massive infrastructure projects to bring commerce and electricity to the countryside, or the construction and staffing of schools and clinics, or subsidizing fertilizer and medicine, or giving away mosquito nets or cheap portable water filters. In the last decade, however, the governments of the nations where most of the world’s poorest actually live have begun to turn to an idea that seems radical in its simplicity: Solve poverty and spur development by simply giving out money.

more from Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe here.

Tariq Ali in the London Review of Books:

A Kashmiri lawyer rang me last week in an agitated state. Had I heard about the latest tragedies in Kashmir? I had not. He was stunned. So was I when he told me in detail what had been taking place there over the last three weeks. As far as I could see, none of the British daily papers or TV news bulletins had covered the story; after I met him I rescued two emails from Kashmir informing me of the horrors from my spam box. I was truly shamed. The next day I scoured the press again. Nothing. The only story in the Guardian from the paper’s Delhi correspondent – a full half-page – was headlined: ‘Model’s death brings new claims of dark side to India’s fashion industry’. Accompanying the story was a fetching photograph of the ill-fated woman. The deaths of (at that point) 11 young men between the ages of 15 and 27, shot by Indian security forces in Kashmir, weren’t mentioned. Later I discovered that a short report had appeared in the New York Times on 28 June and one the day after in the Guardian; there has been no substantial follow-up. When it comes to reporting crimes committed by states considered friendly to the West, atrocity fatigue rapidly kicks in. A few facts have begun to percolate through, but they are likely to be read in Europe and the US as just another example of Muslims causing trouble, with the Indian security forces merely doing their duty, if in a high-handed fashion. The failure to report on the deaths in Kashmir contrasts strangely with the overheated coverage of even the most minor unrest in Tibet, leave alone Tehran.

On 11 June this year, the Indian paramilitaries known as the Central Reserve Police Force fired tear-gas canisters at demonstrators, who were themselves protesting about earlier killings. One of the canisters hit 17-year-old Tufail Ahmad Mattoo on the head. It blew out his brains. After a photograph was published in the Kashmiri press, thousands defied the police and joined his funeral procession the next day, chanting angry slogans and pledging revenge. The photograph was ignored by the mainstream Indian press and the country’s celebrity-trivia-obsessed TV channels. As I write, the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar, and several other towns are under strict military curfew.

More here. [Thanks to Yousaf Hyat.]

Reed Johnson in the Los Angeles Times:

Hancock has placed his mark on modern music like few other performers.

Now he's got a new gig as creative jazz chair of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In that capacity, he'll be responsible for programming jazz concerts at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, bringing in guest artists and possibly commissioning new pieces.

So what are some keys to the professional success and longevity of Hancock, who turned 70 in April and seems as occupied as ever?

Well, one of them is: Study your math and science. As a self-described “techie,” Hancock says his lifelong embrace of electronic experimentation has helped him stay on top as well as take advantage of evolving musical developments.

Here's part of what he had to say on the subject during a recent interview at his Westside home:

“I've always been interested in science. I used to take watches apart and clocks apart, and there's little screws, and a little this and that, and I found out if I dropped one of them, that thing ain't gonna work. When I was a kid, I put things back together and they never worked anyway! But just, like, going into those details, it's kind of a scientist's thing. And I have that kind of [mind], it's part of my personality.”

“I'm one of the people who helped push it in the beginning. It was easier for me because I was an engineering major in college for two years. So when synthesizers came in, they used terminology I knew.”

More here.

Kamil Ahsan in The Box Move:

This essay takes the view that Darwin never worked either purely inductively or deductively. It will demonstrate how Darwin often worked on a hunch, and thus collected his facts not blindly as one might be inclined to believe, but essentially searched for the evidence that could support his hunch of evolution by natural selection. It will further argue that Darwin’s method did not involve mere wide-eyed observation but instead was based on hypotheses that he had already clearly thought about and on analogies from social thought as varied as that of Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith. In order to assess Darwin’s methodology, two levels of analysis will be used. A: Using the Notebooks, Darwin’s recorded thought process will be traced chronologically, marking important occurrences such as his meeting with ornithologist John Gould, and demonstrating through the early effect of Lyell’s geology and Darwin’s unsuccessful hypotheses, that he could not have proceeded inductively. B: Using Darwin’s letters and the Origin, the general themes in Darwin’s collection of evidence to support a work that was two decades or more in preparation will be propounded upon. The themes will thus demonstrate how Darwin selectively chose information to suit his needs especially in the context of Malthusian ideas, and that the best analysis can be made by approaching On the Origin of Species primarily as a work of synthesis and not merely as Darwin’s extrapolation following a great deal of objective observation. When viewing the Origin as a cumulative work, it will also be stressed that Darwin did not simply string together facts from observations in the field of biology, but drew from analogies across disciplines including geology and economics.

More here.

Mark Bradford. The Devil is Beating His Wife. 2003.

Billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, permanent-wave end papers, stencils, and additional mixed media on plywood. 335.3 x 609.6 cm.

More here, here, and here.

The Devil is Beating His Wife, detail.

Jonathan Cook in The National:

The contents of a secretly recorded video threaten to gravely embarrass not only Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister but also the US administration of Barack Obama.

The film was shot, apparently without Mr Netanyahu’s knowledge, nine years ago, when the government of Ariel Sharon had started reinvading the main cities of the West Bank to crush Palestinian resistance in the early stages of the second intifada.

At the time Mr Netanyahu had taken a short break from politics but was soon to join Mr Sharon’s government as finance minister.

On a visit to a home in the settlement of Ofra in the West Bank to pay condolences to the family of a man killed in a Palestinian shooting attack, he makes a series of unguarded admissions about his first period as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999.

Seated on a sofa in the house, he tells the family that he deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords, the US-sponsored peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.

He dismisses the US as “easily moved to the right direction” and calls high levels of popular American support for Israel “absurd”.

He also suggests that, far from being defensive, Israel’s harsh military repression of the Palestinian uprising was designed chiefly to crush the Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat so that it could be made more pliable for Israeli diktats.

More here.

Stanley Kunitz

I used to imagine him
coming from his house, like Merlin
strolling with important gestures
through the garden
where everything grows so thickly,
where birds sing, little snakes lie
on the boughs, thinking of nothing
but their own good lives,
where petals float upward,
their colors exploding,
and trees open their moist
pages of thunder –
it has happened every summer for years.

But now I know more
about the great wheel of growth,
and decay, and rebirth,
and know my vision for a falsehood.
Now I see him coming from the house –
I see him on his knees,
cutting away the diseased, the superfluous,
coaxing the new,
know that the hour of fulfillment
is buried in years of patience –
yet willing to labor like that
on the mortal wheel.

Oh, what good it does the heart
to know it isn’t magic!
Like the human child I am
I rush to imitate –
I watch him as he bends
among the leaves and vines
to hook some weed or other;
I think of him there
raking and trimming, stirring up
those sheets of fire
between the smothering weights of earth,
the wild and shapeless air.

by Mary Oliver

From NPR:

Most people wouldn't describe the periodic table of elements as gripping. But Sam Kean makes it just that in his new book, The Disappearing Spoon.

The book tells the histories of the elements in the periodic table, and in the process, gives a history of famous thinkers, war, literature, protest and more. Kean spoke with NPR's Guy Raz about how he made the periodic table exciting.

Growing up, Kean says, the science teachers that captured his attention most were the ones who explained science through stories. He uses the same technique for his book.

In one story, a single element from the periodic table changed U.S. Senate candidate Stan Jones forever.

“Stan was a big believer that the Y2K virus was going to wipe out civilization,” Kean says. “He was especially concerned that people wouldn't be able to find antibiotics. So he decided he was going to get his immune system ready for the apocalypse in 2000.”

The Montana Libertarian began drinking liquid silver. He'd heard silver had antibacterial effects. It was so, Kean says, but there was a serious — or hilarious — side effect.

“Stan ended up with blue skin while he was running for the Senate,” Kean says. It was permanent.

More here, including an excerpt from the book. [Sam Kean, has been, of course, a longtime writer at 3QD.]

From Himal Southasian:

You know the name you were given,
You do not know the name that you have.
– The Book of Certainties

‘I am a Czechoslovakian, sir’ says the one.
The other slaps him and says, ‘So what?’
– Bohumil Hrabal, The Betrayal of Mirrors

What’s in a name, one may ask. But names and descriptions can pose serious existential questions. One remembers a short story, Shahadat, by the Urdu writer Intizar Hussain, in which a man, during the turmoil of Partition, is reluctant to disclose his actual name. Instead, he decides to use a few other names, which generally signify other faiths. In so doing, the protagonist ponders the significance of a name, and its logical link to the person who ‘owns’ it.

Besides posing existential questions, names have acquired much weight and visibility in the cultural sphere in Pakistan in recent years, especially in the art world. This has become particularly apparent in the tendency to name art events, galleries and publications using ‘local’ terms, such as Vasl, Shanakht, Khayal Khana, Taza Tareen (art events) Nukta, Nigaah, Suhbat (publications) Nairang, Majmoo’a, Kunj, Koel, Khaas, Royaat, Gulmohur (galleries) and so on. A similar propensity is visible in art scenes around Southasia, in a trend that has been visible for the past decade but has shown no signs of slowing down in recent years. All such usages reflect a longing to employ ‘profound’ local terms in connection with art.

More here.

From The New Republic:

Whenever E.M. Forster is discussed, the phrase “only connect” is sure to come up sooner or later. The epigraph to Howards End, the book he described with typical modesty as “my best novel and approaching a good novel,” seems to capture the leading idea of all his work—the moral importance of connection between individuals, across the barriers of race, class, and nation. What is not as frequently remembered is that, when Forster uses the phrase in Howards End, he is not actually talking about this kind of social connection, but about something more elusive and private—the difficulty of connecting our ordinary, conventional personalities with our transgressive erotic desires.

“Only connect” makes its entrance shortly after Margaret Schlegel, the novel’s liberal intellectual heroine, is first kissed by Henry Wilcox, the conservative businessman whom she has rather surprisingly agreed to marry. Passion has played little part in their relationship, and though they have gotten engaged they have not yet touched. When Wilcox suddenly embraces her, then, Margaret “was startled and nearly screamed,” and though she tries to kiss “with genuine love the lips that were pressed against her own,” she feels afterwards that “on looking back, the incident displeased her. It was so isolated. Nothing in their previous conversation had heralded it, and, worse still, no tenderness had ensued … he had hurried away as if ashamed.” A few pages later, Margaret’s reflections on this erotic incompetence lead, as often happens in Forster’s fiction, into an authorial homily:

Outwardly [Henry Wilcox] was cheerful, reliable, and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos, ruled, so far as it was ruled at all, by an incomplete asceticism. Whether as boy, husband, or widower, he had always the sneaking belief that bodily passion is bad…. And it was here that Margaret hoped to help him.

It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was her whole sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

More here.

Tim Parks in the NYRB blog:

The final saw Holland playing Spain, two European colonizers on African territory. Before the game Nelson Mandela’s grandson complained that FIFA had put “extreme pressure” on the elderly hero to attend, despite the fact that he was in mourning for the loss of a great-granddaughter. “Their focus is on having this world icon in the stadium, yet not really paying attention to our customs and traditions as a people and as a family.” The miracle is that anyone ever imagined that FIFA might behave otherwise.

In the event, the grand finale was a disgrace; it also offered another pathetic “English” performance in the shape of the referee, Howard Webb. Having seen German youth outclassed by Spanish skills, the Dutch decided for spoiling tactics. That is fair enough, but their harrying and pressing came with a systematic intimidatory violence that amounted to the worst possible advertisement for football. A “filthfest,” the Guardian’s commentator called it. Webb showed plenty of yellow cards but didn’t have the courage to send a man off until the last minutes of extra time. The moment when Nigel De Jong lifted his leg high to kick his studs into Xabi Alonso’s chest and then was not shown a red card was emblematic of the mentality that FIFA has created in players and officials.

The Dutch team knew that Webb would not want to be responsible for ruining a TV spectacle with a dismissal, so they ruined the game themselves in the hope of grabbing a goal from the shambles they had created. Andres Iniesta’s wonderful strike just five minutes away from a penalty shoot-out was the tournament’s only moment of poetic justice and FIFA’s only fig leaf. On this ugly showing 2014 is rather too soon for a repeat performance.