I’ve always wondered if people who know what the first line in their obituary will be are lucky or cursed. Sure, you know already how (and that) history will remember you. But it’s got to be constricting, too—a feeling of already being defined, as if you can’t contribute anymore. It must be doubly worse for scientists, who often do their best work when young, and have it hanging over them for decades.

Of course, it’s even worse to know what the first line in your obit should be—and then not rate an obit at all, because people forgot you. Such was the fate of Albert Ghiorso (hard “g”), who helped discover more chemical elements, a dozen, than any human being who ever lived. Yet his death earned just three measly mentions in newspapers across the country (and those weeks after he died). I’d like to do the little I can to rectify that.

I wrote about Ghiorso in a recent book, and beyond the wizardry of his science, I remember most of all his mischief. He specialized in building radiation detectors that could pick out the presence of just a few atoms of new elements. The discovery of a new element was always a celebratory event—the periodic table is the most precious real estate in science—so during one experiment Ghiorso decided to wire his radiation detector to his building’s fire alarms at the University of California at Berkeley, so it would briiiiiing every time an atom appeared. For various reasons his team ran the experiment at night, and they cheered all through the a.m. as the atoms rang out. It was a complete success, except Ghiorso forgot to unwire the fire alarm the next morning. While he was at home sleeping, it went off during the day, forcing a panicked evacuation. The administration was not amused. In discovering a different element, berkelium, element 97, Ghiorso suggested using “Bm” as the chemical symbol for it, because it had been such a “stinker” to discover. To the eternal disappointment of every sophomore chemistry student in the world, the idea was vetoed.

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Eric Joisel. Snail.

Origami. One sheet of wetfolded rectangular paper.

More on this fantastic French origami master here and here.

Morgan over at The Smart Set:

It is a time of dreariness and decay. I'm speaking of winter, of course. I always think, when thinking of winter, of the opening lines of Richard III. Richard, the king-to-be, is musing upon the ascension to the throne of his brother, Edward IV. He says, in lines that are burned into the deep pathways of our neural networks, “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York.”

These opening lines of the play are actually quite hopeful. The first word, “now,” looks forward to the “made” in the next line. Shakespeare, in that clever way of his, makes the language fresh by making you pay attention. The “now” is a placeholder for the thought to come. It sets the scenario, grabs us with its immediacy, and lingers there for a moment while we wait for the thought to develop. The thought develops into the idea that “now” is being “made glorious summer” by this son of York. The winter of our discontent is in the past. “Now” is, in fact, a time of glorious summer, a renewal brought about by the reign of Edward IV, son of York.

But the phrase “now is the winter of our discontent” is so powerful that it often gets picked out of context and made to stand alone. When you do that, it seems as if “now” is the winter of our discontent. The winter of our discontent isn't going anywhere. It is simply the way it is right now.

Sometimes when I hear that line I even hear it as a statement not about “now” but about winter. If you think of it as a winter statement, you can almost replace the word “now” with the word “winter,” i.e., “winter is the winter of our discontent.” I don't take this as a simple tautology, “winter is winter,” but the equation of winter the season with winter the mood. Winter, the season, is a time of general discontent. Winter, in its dreariness and decay, is the season of wanting things to be otherwise.

And yet, some part of us wants winter, some part of us glories in the winteriness of winter.

Over at Tablet, Michelle Goldberg profiles Philip Weiss:

When Philip Weiss, the Jewish anti-Zionist writer and blogger, compares himself to Theodor Herzl, he’s not being ironic. “I actually am like him in certain ways,” he says. “Herzl said, ‘Anti-Semites made me Jewish again.’ I would say that neo-conservatives made me Jewish again.”

To the legion of Jews that Weiss has enraged, this will sound perverse. It’s certainly self-aggrandizing. But it also gets at the way that Weiss has abandoned a deeply assimilated life for a profound—if idiosyncratic and tortured—engagement with Jewish questions. As the founder of Mondoweiss, a blog that has become a nucleus of anti-Zionist writing, and a co-editor of a new book about Richard Goldstone’s report on Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza, Weiss says that he now thinks about Jewishness all the time. In his fierce critique of tribal identity, he’s found his tribe—one he believes is growing.

“I think I was alienated from a lot of Jewish communal life in my 20s, 30s, 40s,” Weiss says. “One symptom of that is the fact that I’d never been to Israel until 2006. I was 50 before I got to Israel.” Now that he is 55, Israel has become the center of his life. He goes to rabbinical conventions and corresponds with left-wing Israelis. “I love what I’ve undergone in the last few years,” he says. “And I love my engagement with Jewish communal life now.”

Of course, much of that engagement comes in the form of relentless criticism. Weiss’ blog is fulsomely, intensely anti-Israel—it’s a universe in which even Noam Chomsky, hero of anti-imperialists worldwide, is criticized for his residual attachment to the Jewish state. His obsessive focus on Israel has come at the expense of a successful career as a magazine journalist. Harvard-educated, he got his start writing for the New Republic and later contributed features to New York, and the New York Times Magazine and wrote a column for the New York Observer. Initially he launched Mondoweiss as a general-interest blog on the New York Observer website. When he started to focus on Israel, his editor warned him that he was becoming a crank.

He didn’t listen, and in 2007 he left the Observer, taking the blog with him. Today it operates under the umbrella of the nonprofit Nation Institute, which allows Weiss to solicit tax-deductable contributions. But its budget comes entirely from donations, and Weiss has to rely on his wife, the writer and editor Cynthia Kling, to help support him.

It’s a little hard to figure out why Weiss threw so much away for a cause that was so new to him. Naturally, he sees a linear moral logic to his journey. He looks at contemporary Israel and is appalled.

From The Guardian:

“We are welcoming an era in which 50 is the new 34,” argues Emma Soames, Saga magazine's editor-at-large. The increasingly glamorous image of 50-year-olds has even spawned a new term, the “Quintastics” – thanks, in part, to the visibility of a number of high-profile celebrities who met the event with undiminished glamour in the past year, including Bono, Nigella Lawson, Hugh Grant, Jonathan Ross, Colin Firth, Tilda Swinton and Kristin Scott Thomas. But it's not all good news. “By the time we are 50, we are definitely in the suburbs of mortality,” says Alain de Botton. “After 21, birthdays are really wakes and occasions for mourning – unfairly ascribed a degree of jollity which they absolutely don't require. Yes, older people now look a bit better for a while longer, but essentially, it's pretty much a vale of tears.”

Nevertheless there's something newly cool about turning 50. Just ask George Clooney – whose birthday falls in May and who has almost single-handedly ignited a revival of the Cary Grant/Spencer Tracy brand of suave older man – or Barack Obama (50 in August), still the closest thing we've got to a real-life superhero. As Michelle Pfeiffer said when she reached the landmark: “You just take stock and count your blessings.”

More here.

From The New Republic:

Early in January 1939, the precocious German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, age thirty-two, learned that all males in his age cohort had been ordered to register with the military. A dedicated opponent of the Nazi regime, he might have responded by declaring himself a conscientious objector, but there were two problems with such a course of action. The first was that Bonhoeffer, although pacifist by inclination, was not opposed to violence under all conditions; and he would later play an active role in the conspiracy led by German generals to assassinate Hitler. The second was that his fame in the Confessing Church (more on this below) might encourage other religious leaders critical of the regime to do the same, thereby bringing them under greater suspicion and undermining their efforts to prove that Nazi policies, and especially their rapidly intensifying Jew-hatred, were contrary to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

The solution was provided by America’s most illustrious theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr. Nine years earlier, Bonhoeffer had spent a year in the United States as a free-floating exchange student at Union Theological Seminary, arriving not long after Niebuhr had moved there from Detroit. He had made such a positive impression on Union’s faculty that Niebuhr jumped at the opportunity to bring him back. If we fail to offer him a job, he told Union’s president, Henry Sloane Coffin, Bonhoeffer will wind up in a concentration camp. This was not the stuff of run-of-the-mill letters of recommendation. Union extended the offer. Grateful to have a way out of his dilemma, Bonhoeffer booked passage, and in June 1939 found himself safe in America.

Safe, but unhappy.

More here.

The Story We Know

The way to begin is always the same. Hello,
Hello. Your hand, your name. So glad, just fine,
and Good bye at the end. That’s every story we know,

and why pretend? But lunch tomorrow? No?
Yes? An omelette, salad, chilled white wine?
The way to begin is simple, sane, Hello,

and then it’s Sunday, coffee, the Times, a slow
day by the fire, dinner at eight or nine
and Good bye. In the end, this is a story we know

so well we don’t turn the page, or look below
the picture, or follow the words to the next line:
The way to begin is always the same Hello.

But one night, through the latticed window, snow
begins to whiten the air, and the tall white pine.
Good bye is the end of every story we know

that night, and when we close the curtains, oh,
we hold each other against that cold white sign
of the way we all begin and end. Hello,
Good bye is the only story. We know, we know.

by Martha Collins
from A Catastrophe of Rainbows
Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1985

From the Hindustan Times:

DSC Director Manhad Narula, the brain behind the award, said that he hoped it would have an impact of the scene of literature in South Asia as this was the first such prize honouring work on this subject.

“Some literature prizes tend to give more importance to the author rather than to his or her work. But I hope through this award we are able to ensure what matters is what the author is writing about,” he said.

He said that one of the measures that would go a long away in ensuring credibility to the award is the fact that it honours work on the subject of South Asia, be it by any author of any nationality.

“Its about time South Asians have our own damn award,” said an elated Naqvi.

Asked if he had to say something to his critics, the 36-year-old author said, “Mercifully in the US, in India as well as in Pakistan, my critics have been few. But all criticisms of Home Boy are valued. It is a debut novel and it has all the strengths and weaknesses of a debut novel.”

The winner was decided judged by a jury chaired by Nilanjana S Roy, along with Lord Mathew Evans, Ian Jack, Amitava Kumar and Moni Mohsin.

Awarded for the best work of fiction pertaining to the South Asian region, the prize is given to works published in English, and includes translations in English with a share of the award money also going to the translator.

More here. [Congratulations to Husain from all of us at 3QD, where he was once a columnist.]

A 19th-century French medical examiner and criminologist was even more skilled than the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. A new book recounts his biggest case, which heralded the age of forensic science.

Frank Thadeusz in Der Speigel:

On a good day, Joseph Vacher could win over a woman with his disarmingly innocent demeanor. In these states of mind, he wrote letters in an ornate, rounded feminine handwriting and amused children by making faces at them.

But then Vacher would go into uncontrolled rages. Once, he beat his small dog to death with a club because it wasn't eating its food.

His crimes against human beings were much worse. In remote forests and barns, Vacher, the son of a farmer, raped and murdered a total of 11 people, most of them children.

In late 19th-century France, this diminutive serial killer epitomized ordinary citizens' fears of the evil that lurks in the darkness. At the time, the guillotine was still used to execute dangerous criminals in France. In the Vacher case, however, the judges were hesitant to impose the death penalty. Was the mass murderer “a cannibal” who had to be beheaded, or was he a “certifiably insane person” who was to be locked up in an asylum?

Douglas Starr, a professor of journalism at Boston University, has now reconstructed the series of murders Vacher committed.

In his book, “The Killer of Little Shepherds,” Starr does not, however, assign the leading role to Vacher, the child murderer, but to the man who was to solve the Vacher mystery: Alexandre Lacassagne, the head of forensic medicine in the southern city of Lyon.

Lacassagne solved murder cases that seemed unsolvable at the time. To this day, students in police academies are taught the methods of the master criminologist from Lyon.

More here.