Of all the challenges Conan O’Brien faces on his nationwide “Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television” tour (translating his talk-show aesthetic into a live comedy performance; avoiding coming off as a sore loser), the biggest challenge might be self-inflicted: having to step onstage every night in the wake of his opening act, Reggie Watts. Watts, a star of New York’s alt-comedy scene, is the kind of comedian who tends to close shows. His sets are loud, disorienting bouts of improvised anti-comedy. He is, in many ways, the opposite of O’Brien, as both a performer and a being. O’Brien is gangly and pale; Watts is chubby and dark. O’Brien has an ironic post–Tonight Show beard and that signature little flip of orange hair; Watts has a huge asymmetrical Afro that blends into a beard as thick and dark as good-quality garden loam. O’Brien approaches comedy, famously, as a writer, spending hours preparing each moment onstage. Watts improvises his act so thoroughly that, if a hard-core fan were ever to request a favorite old bit, Watts would probably have no idea what he was talking about. Over the past seventeen years, Conan has established himself as one of America’s most stable comic voices. Watts builds his comedy out of radical instability: He switches so fluidly among different accents and personae (soprano, baritone, Californian, Cockney) that it’s hard to tell what the real person even sounds like. Conan, in other words, is a recognizable type of comedian: a subspecies of the genus Letterman. Watts is like a character Conan might have invented—half-man, half-astral-funk Muppet.

more from Sam Anderson at New York Magazine here.

The geologic record as we know it thus suggests that climate is a profoundly grander thing than energy. Energy procurement is a matter of engineering and keeping the lights on under circumstances that are likely to get more difficult as time progresses. Climate change, by contrast, is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself. The earth doesn’t include the potentially catastrophic effects on civilization in its planning. Far from being responsible for damaging the earth’s climate, civilization might not be able to forestall any of these terrible changes once the earth has decided to make them. Were the earth determined to freeze Canada again, for example, it’s difficult to imagine doing anything except selling your real estate in Canada. If it decides to melt Greenland, it might be best to unload your property in Bangladesh. The geologic record suggests that climate ought not to concern us too much when we’re gazing into the energy future, not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s beyond our power to control.

more from Robert B. Laughlin at The American Scholar here.

William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, famously asked why the devil should have all the best tunes, and proceeded to plunder them for his own missionary purposes. In his stimulating new book, Terry Eagleton seems to have asked himself why theologians should have all the best metaphors, and has proceeded to plunder them in his campaign to bring greater realism to an understanding of contemporary politics. Without repudiating the possibility of a supernatural dimension to Christian doctrine, his purpose in this book is to demonstrate how it can be used to express and interpret the human condition. Using technical theological language, his book could be described as an exercise in realised eschatology: ‘while there could no more be anyone “in” hell than there could be anyone in a material location called debt or love or despair’, hell is real enough, he says – and it’s not just other people. Central to Eagleton’s use of theology in this book is the doctrine of original sin, the only doctrine for which there is an abundance of empirical evidence. Christian anthropology, properly understood, is neither pessimistic nor optimistic – it is realistic; and in that triangulation, which is very important to Eagleton, there are the makings of a whole political philosophy. The human is a tragic animal, aware of the complexity of its own condition, yet never in complete control of it. Claiming to be free, we also know that our choices in life are largely determined by circumstances we had no part in creating.

more from Richard Holloway at Literary Review here.

Gabriel Winant in Salon:

It's never easy to make guesses about what will happen in Middle East politics. But I think we're blowing the event out of proportion — not in its moral gravity, but in its likely immediate political consequences.

First of all, the most crucial relationship Israel has is with the United States, and there isn't much indication yet of that this will alter that relationship. The hard consensus at the elite level in favor of tolerating whatever Israel wants to do rests on a soft consensus in American public opinion. Both are likely to survive this in some slightly diminished form, as they've survived the two Lebanon wars (complete with thoroughly unprovoked massacres), the small Gaza war and the formation of an Israeli government including a quasi-fascist foreign minister.

• Continue reading

Plus, even though Israeli commandos Israel boarded the ships as part of a broad, explicit, and indefensible effort to keep basic supplies out of a desperately needy Gaza, Israel's supporters are aggressively pushing a blame-the-victims counternarrative. There were clubs and knives on board the aid ships, they note, and there's now video of passengers chasing and attacking soldiers. This is likely to muddy the waters enough to keep Americans from reacting with outrage.

American conservatives are already doubling down on their attacks on the ship passengers.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The bestselling Swedish author Henning Mankell was on board a convoy of Gaza-bound aid boats stormed by Israeli forces today, resulting in the deaths of at least 10 activists and injuries to dozens of others. With the ships out of communication since the attack early this morning, it is not yet known whether he is among the injured. Mankell had decided to join the aid-delivering flotilla – also believed to include Nobel peace laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire – in a gesture of solidarity towards Palestinians currently living under the Israeli blockade. The Free Gaza Movement and a coalition of activist groups have been attempting to circumvent import restrictions imposed by the country since 2008.

A spokesperson for Ship to Gaza-Sweden said he had last spoken to someone on board Mankell's ship just before 5am Swedish time (4am BST). “They were telling us then about the Israeli soldiers climbing into the neighbouring ship, and they heard shooting aboard it. I was not speaking to Henning but to one of his friends. The Swedish ship was attacked a bit later, 10-15 minutes later. The whole attack was done between 4-5 o'clock Swedish time,” said Mikael Löfgren.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

When J. Craig Venter announced at a news conference the other day that he and his co-workers had created the first “synthetic cell,” he displayed the savvy graciousness of an actor accepting an Academy Award. Dr. Venter, the renowned genome wrassler and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, praised his two dozen team members and described the long years of struggle that preceded their moment of triumph. He called out important figures in the audience: his editor, his literary agent, the celebrity diet doctor Dean Ornish. And he acknowledged that none of his group’s work would have been possible without a lot of help from the parents — Mother Nature and Father Time.

After all, that stalwart pair was responsible for designing and gradually refining the real cells that brought the Venter team’s synthetic constructs to life. There is, as yet, no escaping the cell. Every past and present lodger on the twisted bristlecone tree of life is built of cells, every cell is a microcosm of life, and neither the Venter team nor anybody else has come close to recreating the cell from scratch. If anything, the new report underscores how dependent biologists remain on its encapsulated power.

More here.

The Rarest Thyme

R. Douglas Fields in Scientific American:

At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti—known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor and architect—was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. Now, 500 years after he drew them, his hidden anatomical illustrations have been found—painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cleverly concealed from the eyes of Pope Julius II and countless religious worshipers, historians, and art lovers for centuries—inside the body of God.

This is the conclusion of Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo, in their paper in the May 2010 issue of the scientific journal Neurosurgery. Suk and Tamargo are experts in neuroanatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1990, physician Frank Meshberger published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association deciphering Michelangelo’s imagery with the stunning recognition that the depiction in God Creating Adam in the central panel on the ceiling was a perfect anatomical illustration of the human brain in cross section. Meshberger speculates that Michelangelo surrounded God with a shroud representing the human brain to suggest that God was endowing Adam not only with life, but also with supreme human intelligence. Now in another panel The Separation of Light from Darkness (shown at left), Suk and Tamargo have found more. Leading up the center of God’s chest and forming his throat, the researchers have found a precise depiction of the human spinal cord and brain stem.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Altaf.]

Robert P. Baird in Digital Emunction:

For nearly four decades, there’s been an open ques­tion about the 1971 coup that brought dic­ta­tor Hugo Banzer Suárez to power in Bolivia: was the U.S. gov­ern­ment involved? Thanks to newly declas­si­fied doc­u­ments, we now have an answer.

Banzer was a dic­ta­tor of Bolivia from 1971-8 and a demo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected pres­i­dent from 1997-2001. His three-​day coup in August 1971 was sig­nif­i­cant not only for the fight­ing that accom­pa­nied it, which left 110 dead and 600 wounded, but for the seven-​year regime that fol­lowed, one of the most repres­sive in Bolivia’s his­tory. Under Banzer’s rule, more than 14,000 Boli­vians were arrested with­out a judi­cial order, more than 8,000 were tortured—with elec­tric­ity, water, beatings—and more than 200 were exe­cuted or dis­ap­peared.

More here.

Ben Zimmer in the New York Times Magazine:

The Times Literary Supplement, the erudite British weekly, isn’t the first place you would expect to find an outbreak of cool. But for a recent stretch of a few months, its letters page was home to a protracted debate over exactly how cool got cool.

It all started in January, when Toby Lichtig reviewed “Journey by Moonlight,” a 1937 novel by the Hungarian writer Antal Szerb that has recently been translated into English by Len Rix. Lichtig gave a thumbs up to Rix’s rendering, but he complained about the text’s occasional anachronisms, particularly the use of cool “in its contemporary sense” — that is, in the “stylish” or “admirable” meaning popularized by the cool cats and chicks of the postwar era and exemplified by the all-purpose expression of appreciation or approval, “That’s cool.”

A parade of nine T.L.S. readers questioned how modern the “contemporary sense” of cool actually is, pulling out 19th- and early-20th-century quotations from writers as diverse as Wilkie Collins and T. E. Lawrence to support the idea that our current understanding of cool is not so new after all. E. D. Hirsch Jr., the American author of “Cultural Literacy,” even chipped in with a line from Abraham Lincoln (“That is cool”). The whole discussion, unfortunately, drifted into a muddle of anecdotes without any firm grip on the semantics of cool.

More here.

I am afraid of airplanes. I am afraid of boats. I am afraid of automobiles, especially as a passenger and especially at night. I am afraid of heights, and elevators, and cliff faces. I am afraid of any seat in a theater more than one away from an aisle. I am afraid of the dark, and of snapping twigs in a forest. I am afraid of murky water, of depth, currents, sharks. I am afraid of snakes. I am afraid of dogs. I am afraid of teenaged boys who travel in groups. I am afraid of anyone at any time with a gun. I am afraid of my heart and the million and one blood vessels that connect it to every part of my body, I am afraid of my freckles and pimples and glands, swollen or otherwise, and I am afraid of my brain. I monitor every scrape for signs of gangrene, and believe that every wheezing breath, whether induced by exercise or panic, is a sign of my weakness, if not of body then of mind: if I don’t die then I will kill myself, over and over and over again. There are moments when I forget to be afraid, and when I remember those moments later, I am afraid of them most of all. As I write this I sit on a moss- and fern-covered boulder in a place called Dutcher’s Notch, which is nothing more than a crossroads on the side of a mountain on the eastern edge of the Catskills.

more from Dale Peck at Threepenny Review here.

With no narrative through-line of political or literary development, Hitch 22 relies on the assumption that its readers will want to follow its author’s arbitrary recollections of family, friends, opinions and travels. He gives over whole chapters to [James] “Fenton,” “Salman” [Rushdie], and “Martin” [Amis]. But the more he writes about them, the less he seems to reveal. Fenton, he declares, was a marvellous poet who liked long walks and “the ancient buildings and antique trees and botany of Oxford.” Did that sentence really fall from the pen of Christopher Hitchens? The friend on whom he lavishes the purplest ink is Martin Amis, and there are mortifying hints that he has used Amis’s own masterpiece of memoir, Experience, as a model. Hence, perhaps, the leaps in theme and chronology, the lurches between private and public worlds, and the grizzly fumbling for comic self-exposure. Mutual masturbation at public school, or homosexual encounters at university—with future cabinet ministers in a Thatcher government—are referred to at once coyly (he withholds significant names) and tastelessly. He and his Oxford contemporary Bill Clinton, he reveals, were at different times involved “with a pair of Leckford girls who, principally Sapphic in their interests, would arrange for sessions of group frolic.”

more from Alexander Linklater at Prospect Magazine here.

In 1975, when I was a critic for the Times, an editor sat me down and told me that the paper was cutting back on reviews in favor of features. He added that there was a big future for a young man who wanted to be an investigative reporter in the art world. What story did he have in mind? The dealings of Leo Castelli. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. That year, a celebrated conviction of the dealer Frank Lloyd, for conspiring to plunder the estate of Mark Rothko, fed popular suspicions that the art world was a quasi-criminal enterprise zone, in which Castelli—who had a near-monopoly on the top artists and sold their work for prices that seemed fantastic—figured to be the gangster-in-chief. And what young journalist didn’t ache for the laurels of a Woodward or a Bernstein? I didn’t. I liked the art world, and I revered Castelli, though he made me nervous. Treated to the silken manners and melting gaze of the small, neat man from Trieste—with his unplaceable accent, which Tom Wolfe described as “soft, suave, and slightly humid, like a cross between Peter Lorre and the first secretary of a French embassy”—I felt like a farm boy with cow pies in my pockets. He sensed this, I’m convinced, and left me alone when I visited the holy of holies that was his gallery, first at 4 East Seventy-seventh Street and, after 1971, at 420 West Broadway, flashing me the odd quick knowing smile. Leo (almost no one who met him even once called him anything else) wielded custom-tailored ways of making people feel special—all people, because he crowned his Continental glamour with a faintly comic and completely endearing American-style openness.

more from Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker here.

June 21, 2010, UPDATE: The winners have been announced.

June 11, 2010, UPDATE: See list of nine finalists here.

June 8, 2010, UPDATE: Voting round closed. See list of twenty semifinalists here.

June 2, 2010, UPDATE: Nominations are now closed. Go here to see the list of nominees and vote.

May 31, 2010, UPDATE: Today is the last day for nominations.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

A year ago we announced that we would start awarding four sets of prizes every year (on the two solstices and the two equinoxes) for the best blog writing in the areas of science, philosophy, politics, and arts & literature. We awarded the science prizes, judged by Steven Pinker, on June 21, then announced the winners of the philosophy prizes, judged by Daniel C. Dennett, on September 22, followed by the politics prizes, judged by Tariq Ali, for which the winners were announced on December 21, and finally, the arts & literature prizes were judged by Robert Pinsky, and the winners announced on March 22, 2010.

Thus we completed our first annual cycle of prizes having exceeded our own expectations of success: through our contests we found, for our readers as well as for ourselves, great new blogs and writers to read and follow, and the quality and range of the submissions was excellent in general. And we hope that in our own small way we also managed to spur and encourage good writing in the blogosphere by acknowledging and rewarding it. We are proud that well-known and highly accomplished experts agreed to serve as final judges for each of the four sets of prizes in the first year. We thank each of them again.

We are now ready to start the second cycle of annual prizes, and could not be more excited that Professor Richard Dawkins has agreed to judge the second annual science prize. Since we hardly ever mention him here at 3 Quarks, and many of you may not know who he is, let me say a few words to introduce him… Please, I am joking! I do actually, and very seriously, wish to say this: we could not have found a better judge for science writing, as in my opinion as well as that of many, many others, Richard is simply the best science writer of our time. We are very honored to have him.

As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open, and will end at 11:59 pm EDT on May 31, 2010. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Richard.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a two hundred dollar prize.

* * *

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.)

* * *

Details:

The winners of the science prize will be announced on June 21, 2010. Here's the schedule:

May 24, 2010:

• The nominations are opened. Please nominate your favorite science blog entry by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win.
• Blog posts longer than 4,000 words are not eligible.
• Each person can only nominate one blog post.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old. In other words, it must have been written after May 23, 2009.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• Nominations are limited to the first 200 entries.
• Prize money must be claimed within a month of the announcement of winners.
• You may also comment here on our prizes themselves, of course!

May 31, 2010

• The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date.
• The public voting will be opened soon afterwards.

June 7, 2010

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

June 21, 2010

• The winners are announced.

And another Mini-Contest!

For each of our contests, I have asked designer friends of mine to produce “trophy” logos that the winners of that prize can display on their own blogs. You can see all of them here. I am now running out of designer friends, so here is an offer: send me your design for a logo for the winners of the Arts & Literature Prize (it must contain the same info as in the examples I have linked to, and the size is 160 X 350 pixels), and if I use it, I'll send you $25. Try. It'll be fun. Deadline: June 10, 2010.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, post a link on your Facebook profile, Tweet it, or just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

Zhang Huan. Memory Door Series. Library No 1. 2007.

More here, here, and here.

Editor's Note: In the spirit of The New Yorker's popular caption contest, we will be presenting original cartoons done for 3QD by the very talented Robert Pichler. Unlike The New Yorker, we are not running a real contest, but just for fun, we encourage you to suggest captions in the comments area.

Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:

What astounds me about today's metaphorical glass-house dwellers—those people who eagerly publicize on websites every detail of their “health” (DNA profile), “finances” (shopping bills and consumer preferences), “family situation” (online dating profile)—is how cheerfully they participate in “one of the most horrifying aspects of modern life.” Self-invasions of privacy on the Internet now compete with “bureaucracy with its documents” and “the press with its reporters” for a place on Kundera's list of the institutionalization and I would add normalization of this “age-old form of aggression.” And so, too, it seems to me, do all those glass apartment houses which sprang up everywhere in New York City during the glory years of the last building boom. I am still baffled as to why architects thought it was a good idea to erect pricey, luxury apartments without solid, exterior walls on streets that are exposed not only to the casual glance of thousands of city walkers from below but also to the unavoidable notice of those who live or work in the many neighboring buildings, and that a new breed of fashionable New Yorkers couldn't wait to live in them.

More here.