Like most Englishmen, I have been brainwashed by William Wordsworth. Although I don’t much like walking, I love seeing the landscape but if I spot a person, then that “spoils” it. We all want to wander lonely as clouds. Given that there will be more than 70m lonely clouds in this archipelago by 2050, the prospects for Wordsworthianism do not seem very good. Yet the strange fact is that in Britain we can still “get away from it all” with ease. From the strange, bleak, featureless isles of North and South Uist in Scotland, which contain some of the oldest geological formations in this complicated, beautiful archipelago, down to the crags and coves of Cornwall; from the deserted Borders between Scotland and England to the Lincolnshire wolds, which roll for seemingly endless miles beneath the huge sky; from the deeply green valleys of unvisited mid-Wales to the great cornfields of Suffolk, the British landscape is both varied and, for so many miles, awe-inspiringly unwrecked. It is still possible to drive through these landscapes and pass scarcely another car.

more from AN Wilson at the FT here.

Now everyone can read for themselves what, according to student transcripts, Martin Heidegger lectured on between November 1933 and February 1934 under the title “On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and the State”. In April 1933, he became rector of the Albert Ludwig University and in 1934, he handed in his resignation. During his year in power he applied himself single-mindedly to organising the university’s Gleichschaltung (bringing into line). All the documents from his rectoral term are now all being published together. The lack of empathy in their tone stands in contrast, for example, to his speech honouring the the Nazi martyr figure Albert Leo Schlageter from May 1933. The documents show that during the one year intermezzo, the new masters could rely on Heidegger. He cancelled the evening readings in January 1934, so that the “swearing in of People’s Chancellor” could be celebrated in style. He called upon people to make donations to the Winterhilfswerk so that it might become a “visible demonstration of the Volksgemeinschaft” (people’s community). He arranged, “after consultation with leaders of the student body” that the hand should only be raised for the fourth verse of the Horst Wessel Lied.

more from Albert Kissler at Sign and Sight here.

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died in New York on Nov. 9, 1953, at age 39. Already a celebrity, Thomas was turned into a legend. Did he die as a result of 18 double whiskies drunk neat in the White Horse Tavern? Or was the cause half a grain of morphine (enough to lay out a horse) administered by an incompetent physician? Did another doctor really say that the poet was dying of “a serious insult to the brain”? Reports conflict, myth balloons. Thomas’ put-upon physique took several days to finally give up its ghost, time enough for hundreds to flock to the doors of his hospital ward, to pay their respects, perhaps, or to glimpse the roaring boy in his ruin, and for his glamorous and equally tempestuous wife, Caitlin ( Uma Thurman and Lindsay Lohan are among the actress who have down the years been slated to play her, in bio-pics that — this being the story of a great love, and Dylan Thomas — always seem to fall apart at the last minute), to fly in from England, freak out and almost get herself committed to Bellevue. Thus was enacted a tragic death, which had been preceded by a life of fame, love, booze, debts.

more from Richard Rayner at the LAT here.

The Wall – 122 AD

Hadrian
Where are you?
As I walk upon your wall
Of tumbled stone
Across the land
With my gps
And mobile phone

Hadrian
Where are you?
With your bright red plume
Of eagle feather
As I stagger through
Your ruined dream
In nasty English weather

Hadrian
Where are you?
Now that time has done
Its caustic deeds
And left you here
Nothing but crumbled rock
and withered weeds

You thought empire
…..unconquerable
…..You thought wall
…..impenetrable
…..You thought power
…..invincible

But even stone
brick and mortar
even you . . .
Hadrian

By Bill Schneberger, May 2010

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

In the 19th century, Americans really turned to the business of thinking about themselves. “What have we got here, anyway?” was the operational question. They came up with two big answers. The first answer was that America is nothing. The second answer was that America is everything. Simple and obscure all at once, just like so many Americans.

The nothing part was about wiping the slate clean. European civilization had come to America to be obliterated, and America happily obliged. The everything part was about what you're left with after the obliteration. For 19th-century America, the everything was in Nature, which you spelled with a capital “N” and then let Ralph Waldo Emerson do the rest. Ralph would write sentences like, “The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him.” We had lost the culture of Europe, but we had gained a relationship with Nature that gave us direct access to Truth, Beauty, and God.

This exchange of culture for truth did, however, generate a sense of anxiety. There was the feeling that it might not last, that American purity would be lost with the onward march of civilization just as it had all gone wrong in Europe. Paradise, after all, has been known to lead to The Fall.

More here.

From Literary Review:

The best biographies, like some of the best novels, are packed with subjunctives. They are alive with a persistent, muted sense of what might have been. The lives of educated, imaginative, middle-class, mid-nineteenth century women were often tragically packed with subjunctives. Excluded from the public sphere, these women were further constrained by a scarcely figurative matrimonial corset, that patriarchal contraption so lovingly tightened of late. Subject to such chronic restriction, a young woman might take refuge in illness and romantic fiction or, more audaciously, adultery and suicide. Emma Bovary, that small-town extremist, exhausts both possibilities. For those more fortunate than her, there might be a carefully chaperoned excursion to somewhere far away – to Egypt, for example.

Anthony Sattin's A Winter on the Nile contains the story of one such exceptional nineteenth-century journey. The book is one part travel writing, one part cultural history, and one part biography. It's a delicious mix, skilfully blended. There are two travellers, an English woman and a French man, both in their late twenties. They are eloquently self-aware and profoundly unhappy. They are hoping to find a new purpose to their lives. They arrive in Egypt in November 1849, within days of each other. They stay in adjacent hotels. They travel along the same river, and they visit the same places at the same season of the year. They confide their secrets to their journals. They write vivid letters home. For two days they are to be found on the upper and the lower decks of the same steamship, plodding along the lower Nile from Alexandria to Cairo.

These two young travellers, so nicely oblivious of each other, are Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert. Within seven years of their journey along the Nile both will be famous, she as the saviour of the wounded soldiers of the Crimean War, he as the author of Madame Bovary. His novel will be the classic description of the subjection of women. Her mission to the Crimea will foreshadow their emancipation. At this point in their lives, though, their primary creative energies are paralysed. Egypt may transform them.

More here.

From The New York Times:

For someone who grew up in a not particularly exciting city in Canada — yes, yes, that was a joke — the sexual revolution was something that happened to someone else, somewhere else, most probably in that enchanted, faraway Gomorrah called the United States. I had certainly read about the sexual revolution in magazines like Time, and I was nothing if not eager to take it beyond the theoretical. But the knock on the door never came, and when I left for the rough-and-tumble of New York in the 1970s, I was still waiting for the sexual rebellionto conscript me into its welcoming bosom. We could chat on and on about the dating­ habits of my beloved homeland — where even post-­marital sex was gently frowned on — but there is a book to review here. And it is written by Martin Amis, a British foot soldier on the pulsing, sweaty front lines of that era’s social sexual upheaval. To Amis, London was a petri dish of sexual experimentation. In his new novel, “The Pregnant Widow” he says that sex was everywhere, and that the turning point in the whole affair arrived when girls became sexual aggressors who could pursue their desires and enjoy “the tingle of license” just like their male counterparts. Yes, just like guys, minus the pleading.

To discuss a Martin Amis book, you must first discuss the orchestrated release of a Martin Amis book. In London, which rightly prides itself on the vibrancy of its literary cottage industry, Amis is the Steve Jobs of book promoters, and his product rollouts are as carefully managed as anything ­Apple dreams up. The Amis campaigns tend to follow a rough pattern. In the first wave are interviews in the broadsheets: The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Observer and so forth. Amis is photographed or described doing laddish things like playing darts, shooting billiards and drinking in the middle of the day. Names are dropped: Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton, Ian McEwan, Clive James, Philip Larkin and Julian Barnes, with whom Amis had a very public falling-out some years ago.

More here.

From the introduction of Michael Dummett's new book:

Practically every university throughout the world deems it as essential to have a philosophy department as to have a history department or a chemistry department. This is certainly a very lucky thing for philosophers. Historians can teach in schools and advise on television programs and films; the minority gifted with the ability to write popular books can subsist on their incomes as authors. Chemists can work for industry; if they are lucky, they may even be paid by their companies to do research. By contrast, only in a few countries is philosophy taught as a subject in the schools; philosophy books will never become best-sellers; no commercial enterprise will pay for original work in this field. Until recently, professional philosophers would have been unemployable had it not been for the universities. Some who specialize in ethics have obtained positions advising on bioethics, that is, on moral problems arising out of or within the practice of medicine; but of course this is an application of only one specialized branch of the subject. In the modern world, scarcely anyone can live without being employed or profitably self-employed. Philosophers not engaged in applied ethics must count themselves extremely fortunate that the state, which funds many of the universities, is willing to pay that they may devote themselves to the pursuit of their subject.

It is by no means obvious that universities, and thus ultimately the state, should support philosophy but for historical precedent. If universities had been an invention of the second half of the twentieth century, would anyone have thought to include philosophy among the subjects that they taught and studied? It seems very doubtful. But the history of Western universities goes back 900 years—that of Islamic universities even further—and philosophy has always been one of the subjects taught and studied in them. It just does not occur to anyone not to include a philosophy department among those composing a university.

It would be easy to conclude that this is an anachronism.

It might sound odd to say this about something people deal with at least three times a day, but food in America has been more or less invisible, politically speaking, until very recently. At least until the early 1970s, when a bout of food price inflation and the appearance of books critical of industrial agriculture (by Wendell Berry, Francis Moore Lappé, and Barry Commoner, among others) threatened to propel the subject to the top of the national agenda, Americans have not had to think very hard about where their food comes from, or what it is doing to the planet, their bodies, and their society. Most people count this a blessing. Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any people in history—slightly less than 10 percent—and a smaller amount of their time preparing it: a mere thirty-one minutes a day on average, including clean-up. The supermarkets brim with produce summoned from every corner of the globe, a steady stream of novel food products (17,000 new ones each year) crowds the middle aisles, and in the freezer case you can find “home meal replacements” in every conceivable ethnic stripe, demanding nothing more of the eater than opening the package and waiting for the microwave to chirp. Considered in the long sweep of human history, in which getting food dominated not just daily life but economic and political life as well, having to worry about food as little as we do, or did, seems almost a kind of dream.

more from Michael Pollan at the NYRB here.

Appeal to intuition has long been one of the core tools, if it can be called that, of the philosophical method. It is intuition, understood as that immediate operation of the mind by which knowledge is obtained without either observation of the world or inference from premises, that both distinguishes the work of the philosopher from that of the scientist, and motivates the familiar accusation that philosophy is a mere “armchair” discipline. Even those philosophers thick-skinned enough to ignore this accusation tend to recognize one deep problem with excessive reliance on the evidence of intuitions: any given intuition, considered in isolation, is only as reliable as the person who has it. But how can we determine that? One obvious way would be to check the intuition against several other intuitions. But then, inevitably, philosophy finds itself drifting into the territory of the social sciences, something the majority of philosophers steadfastly refuse to let happen. This still very comfortable majority has, in the past few years, come under attack by a small cadre of professional philosophers who have dared to engage openly in the heretical practice of empirical inquiry. Their movement, which has come to be called “x-phi” by some of its adherents, proposes to create an experimental branch of the discipline that will challenge the armchair intuitions with which most philosophers have been content to work, by presenting empirical data showing the extent to which laypeople disagree with these intuitions.

more from our own Justin E.H. Smith at n+1 here.

For Walser the past is a ruin, something that can never be recovered. As Bernofsky once told me, the fundamental idea driving the microscript “A Kind of Cleopatra” is that real experience can only occur in the past: as in so much of late Walser, a fully felt life is something that can no longer be had. This does not, however, imply the notion that the best of days are long gone, for in such an equation the past remains a ruin, a fragment, a ghostly demarcation of something that was there but is no longer available. Its very lack of tangibility, in other words, is a failure of sorts, an idea that falls sort of an ideal. This feeling of being thrust into the future, therefore, is not progress, but a maelstrom, a terrible storm. The future provides no escape from the overwhelming presence of the present. So Walser is placed, as his readers often are, in a position of waiting, of uncertainty. Our backs face the ruins of the past, the ruins of what we have just read, but there is never any certainty that the future will provide relief. In this sense, Walser is a remarkably modern writer: he sublimates one of the primary concerns of the modern mind, that the future will be just as faulty and ruined as the past.

more from George Fragopoulos at The Quarterly Conversation here.

From The Telegraph:

'Something is missing in our culture,” Ian McEwan proclaims. “We can’t quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.” And then a little later: “We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences.” McEwan is taking questions at the end of a lecture he has given to the Royal Society of Literature on Darwin and Einstein and the ways in which notions of “originality” might relate to the sciences compared with the arts. “I want to try and usefully blur the distinctions between the two realms,” McEwan tells me the next morning. “On the one hand there is a scientific tradition. Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do make discoveries. We do refine our tools. So I am arguing with, or at least playing with, the idea that art never improves.”

McEwan is rare among his peers in taking an active interest in the sciences — and in welcoming scientific ideas into his fiction. “I’m not interested in a form of modern intellectual who has no interest in science,” he says. Since he wrote Black Dogs (1992), which used a failing marriage to dramatise the argument between rationalism and faith, rationalist ideas have won out, and have often been the driving force of his novels.

More here.

From Edge:

On May 20th, J. Craig Venter and his team at J.C Venter Institute announced the creation of a cell controlled by a synthetic genome in a paper published in SCIENCE. As science historian George Dyson points out, “from the point of view of technology, a code generated within a digital computer is now self-replicating as the genome of a line of living cells. From the point of view of biology, a code generated by a living organism has been translated into a digital representation for replication, editing, and transmission to other cells.”

This new development is all about operating on a large scale. “Reading the genetic code of a wide range of species,” the paper says, “has increased exponentially from these early studies. Our ability to rapidly digitize genomic information has increased by more than eight orders of magnitude over the past 25 years.” This is a big scaling up in our technological abilities. Physicist Freeman Dyson, commenting on the paper, notes that “the sequencing and synthesizing of DNA give us all the tools we need to create new forms of life.” But it remains to be seen how it will serve in practice.

One question is whether or not a DNA sequence alone is enough to generate a living creature. One way of reading the paper suggests this doesn't seem to be the case because of the use of old microplasma cells into which the DNA was inserted — that this is not about “creating” life” since the new life requires an existing living recipient cell. If this is the case, what is the chance of producing something de novo? The paper might appear to be about a somewhat banal technological feat. The new techniques build on existing capabilities. What else is being added, what is qualitatively new?

While it is correct to say that the individual cell was not created, a new line of cells (dare one say species?) was generated. This is new life that is self-propagating, i.e. “the cells with only the synthetic genome are self replicating and capable of logarithmic growth.”

The paper concludes with the following:

If the methods described here can be generalized, design, synthesis, assembly, and transplantation of synthetic chromosomes will no longer be a barrier to the progress of synthetic biology. We expect that the cost of DNA synthesis will follow what has happened with DNA sequencing and continue to exponentially decrease. Lower synthesis costs combined with automation will enable broad applications for synthetic genomics.

Will the new techniques described in the paper allow us to bring extinct species back to life? Here are three examples of three possible stages after the production of a bacterial cell: 1. generating a human, i.e. a Neanderthal; 2. generating a woolly mammoth; 3. generating a tasmanian wolf.

KEVIN KELLY Editor-At-Large, Wired; Author, Out of Control The major effect of this paper will be to force a redefinition of life, since we declare that nothing we manufacture can be life.

More here.

Distance

Though you can see for miles
across the lake to the mountain,
and though you can imagine
all that lies beyond, ridge
after ridge and the rivers
joining to make their slow,
swollen progress to the sea;
though you think you can say
how far the sunlight travels
to wash the ears of ivy
and make the hawkweed blaze,
to warm the stone's cold shoulder
and warm the wary heart;
though you think as you swim
how you used to swim with her,
how you'd lie on your backs
and press your feet together
and race each other back to shore;
though you've reached, you think,
some idea of distances involved,
how things are so far apart
yet one and the same—
it will be, you will find,
as nothing to the distance
opened by the loon's cry
that first night; and in the wake
of that cry, the silence.

by Mark Roper
from Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland,
Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2010

Shikha Dalmia in Forbes:

Over the centuries, Hindus have articulated a whole litany of gripes against Muslims but most involve–at least on the face of it–some material impact on Hindu interests. For example, special Haj lanes near airports to accommodate Muslims headed for Mecca are a source of endless irritation for Hindus stuck in traffic snarls. But what Hindus don't generally get worked up over–at least not strongly enough to create a credible political movement–are personal Muslim habits that don't in some direct way affect them. Indeed, last year a state college triggered a big brouhaha–especially among Indian feminists–when it refused to let a burqa-clad woman attend classes. Pramila Nesargi, a Hindu politician who champions women's causes, declared: “Not allowing a woman to come to college just because she is wearing a burqa is against her personal rights, fundamental rights and human rights.”

The contrast with the French spirit could not be starker. As a precursor to final legislation, French lawmakers recently voted for a non-binding resolution condemning the burqa because they see in it not an expression of personal piety–but a message of religious fundamentalism meant to insult French secularism. President Nicolas Sarkozy went so far as to say that the burqa is “not welcome” in France, calling it a symbol of female “subservience and debasement.” Likewise, Christopher Hitchens, the most prominent cheerleader of the burqa ban in America, is convinced that Muslim women don the veil not because they choose to–but because they risk acid in their face if they don't. Hence, in his view, France will actually do Muslim women a favor by banning it.

More here. [Thanks to Cyrus Hall.]

Carl Zimmer in Discover:

Your nose is a paradox. In some ways the human sense of smell is astonishingly precise. For example, natural gas companies add a smelly molecule called n-butyl mercaptan to natural gas, which is odorless by itself, so that people can sniff gas leaks. All it takes is one n-butyl mercaptan molecule for every 10 billion molecules of methane to do the trick. To put this precision in perspective, imagine you are standing in front of two Olympic-size swimming pools. One of them contains a grand total of three drops of n-butyl mercaptan, and the other has none. Your nose could tell the difference.

But don’t get too smug, because in other ways your sense of smell is practically useless. To judge for yourself, find someone to help you run a simple experiment. Close your eyes while your partner raids your refrigerator and then holds different foods under your nose. Try to name each scent. If you’re like most people, you’ll bomb. In a number of studies, scientists have found that people tested on items in their own kitchens and garages give the wrong answer at least half the time. And as bad as we normally are at identifying smells, we can easily be fooled into doing worse. If orange food coloring is added to cherry-flavored soda, for example, people are more likely to say that it smells like oranges.

Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and his colleagues have been puzzling over this paradox for the past several years. What has been missing in the science of smell, they argue, is a meaningful way to measure it—an olfactory yardstick. Now they have built one.

More here.

Laura Donnelly in The Telegraph:

Hundreds of members of the BMA have passed a motion denouncing the use of the alternative medicine, saying taxpayers should not foot the bill for remedies with no scientific basis to support them.

The BMA has previously expressed scepticism about homoeopathy, arguing that the rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence should examine the evidence base and make a definitive ruling about the use of the remedies in the NHS.

Now, the annual conference of junior doctors has gone further, with a vote overwhelmingly supporting a blanket ban, and an end to all placements for trainee doctors which teach them homeopathic principles.

Dr Tom Dolphin, deputy chairman of the BMA's junior doctors committee in England told the conference: “Homeopathy is witchcraft. It is a disgrace that nestling between the National Hospital for Neurology and Great Ormond Street [in London] there is a National Hospital for Homeopathy which is paid for by the NHS”.

More here.

Max Blumenthal in The Nation:

A May 6 “expose” from the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot gave Israeli government officials and their hardline American proxies the ammunition they had been seeking against Judge Richard Goldstone. After Goldstone, a Jewish former South African judge who describes himself as a proud Zionist, charged Israel with crimes against humanity for its assault on the Gaza Strip in late 2008 and 2009, the Israeli government sought to destroy him. Now, thanks to Yediot's report, which documented Goldstone's career as a judge in South Africa's apartheid system and ignored his heroic role in guiding the country's democratic transition, Israel and its allies have renewed their assault.

According to an editorial by Alan Dershowitz, Goldstone “helped legitimate one of the most racist regimes in the world… he had climbed the judicial ladder on whipped backs and hanged bodies.” Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Magazine followed up, calling Goldstone, “a man without a moral compass.” The attack spread throughout the neocon blogosphere, including to Tablet, where Marc Tracy accused Goldstone of publishing his report about the assault on Gaza to alleviate his “severe case of guilt.” Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon piled on, characterizing the judge's explanation for working inside the apartheid system as “the same explanation we heard in Nazi Germany after World War II.”

However, by assailing Goldstone's reputation to protect Israel from the meticulously documented facts and modest recommendations contained in his report about the assault on Gaza, Israel's right-wing government and its American allies unwittingly summoned the Banquo's Ghost of Israeli foreign policy: the country's longtime military alliance with South Africa's apartheid regime.

More here.