Leon Neyfakh in the NY Observer:

Hugh Hefner’s Playboy has acquired the first serial rights to The Original of Laura, the final, unfinished novella of the late Vladmir Nabokov.

For years, Nabokov’s son Dmitri indicated that, per his father’s dying wishes, Laura would never see the light of day. Then last spring he had a change of heart and entrusted the super-agent Andrew Wylie to find a publisher. Knopf secured the rights for an undisclosed sum, and a publication date was set for this coming fall. When Amy Grace Loyd, Playboy’s literary editor since 2005, heard the news, she began an intense courtship process. “I did it with orchids, mostly,” Ms. Loyd said.

It was an inspired method, the flowers serving as a reference to Nabokov’s 1969 novel Ada, or Ardor, which was excerpted in Playboy—thus a reminder for Mr. Wylie of the magazine’s long and treasured association with the author. “It was part of my pitch to Andrew that Nabokov really liked publishing with Playboy, and how devoted Hef is to Nabokov and his legacy,” Ms. Loyd said.

Mr. Wylie was initially unresponsive.

More here. [Thanks to Laura Claridge.]

Corporate Identity

this saturday you’re behind the counter

in the work coat you want to shed

like an unwanted skin at the end of your shift.

there’s the 5 o’clock rush to get through

& you don’t want to hear how Michael on bags

got an extra shift at subway to save for his car.

Your white name tag lets the customers think

they can call you by your name;

the logo on your chest promises a New World

but little was gained from the shelvers’ lockout.

What’s left after the prepaid’s paid for

you’ll put to a silver Playboy necklace

with an imitation diamond eye, or

a pair of Nike trainers, each whoosh

a tick for a Vietnamese child’s

fourteen hour day. last week tala

gave you resurrection & you copied

tupac shakur’s name into your senior

social studies notebook in the style

of a typeface owned by the sony Corporation.

You hand back the man’s Flybuy card, try

not to frown as he fumes when the EFTPOS

doesn’t take his PIN. on your inside

left thigh there’s a tattoo of the Vietnamese

character for love you let no–one but tala

see. You got the idea from angelina Jolie—

now it has become your own & beneath black

polyester pants the sigil warms you;

keeps you real.

by Harvey Molloy

Albatross, Spring 2009; Anabiosis Press

From Harvard Magazine:

Khaled became my patient 41 years ago, when he was a tiny misshapen six-year-old with paper-thin, distorted bones. He was close to heart failure and so anemic when I met him that his blood was watery. I thought he might die in front of me. He has thalassemia, a severe anemia arising from the inheritance of two defective hemoglobin-production genes, one from each parent, both of whom are healthy (albeit mildly anemic) because they each carry only one such defective gene. There are many thousands of patients like Khaled throughout the old malarious world, but only a handful in the United States. The many ancient gene mutations that shut down hemoglobin production in red blood cells have been preserved and enhanced in humans because infant carriers of the mutations are partially protected from a particularly lethal type of malaria. Therefore the thalassemia genes have persisted by Darwinian natural selection of carriers; an unfortunate circumstance in which a disease gene persists because it provides partial protection from a lethal infection. The result is the proliferation of carriers and the birth of thousands of babies with two defective genes who become profoundly anemic and require lifelong transfusion of red cells. The patients–the “lucky” ones–are huge consumers of medical care; most often, the carrier parents face the loss of their child at an early age.

During the past four decades I have been forced to give Khaled red-blood-cell transfusions every three to four weeks. Such treatment, though an absolute requirement of his care, is fraught with devastating complications. Consequently he has had to endure and surmount one massive medical assault after another. But he has survived, and today he is a successful entrepreneur. Nonetheless, he has been battered by all the major consequences of managing his disease. His success is largely due to his own resilient, positive outlook (admittedly maddening when he would refuse to do what I told him to do), the support of his family, the commitment of Children’s Hospital Boston and its entire staff to children in need, and the continued and remarkable explosion in biomedical and pharmaceutical science that permits physicians like me to offer care that was impossible when Khaled and I first met. In this 40-year relationship–fully half my own life–I have found unexpected lessons about doctoring, the advance of medicine, and our system of healthcare itself.

More here.

From Nature:

Rapamycin, a drug commonly used in humans to prevent transplanted organs from being rejected, has been found to extend the lives of mice by up to 14% — even when given to the mice late in life. In flies and worms, drug treatments have been shown to prolong lifespan, but until now, the only robust way to extend life in mammals has been to heavily restrict diet. The researchers caution, however, that using this drug to extend the lifespan of humans might be problematic because it suppresses the immune system — potentially making people who take it more susceptible to infectious diseases. Research teams at three different US institutions — the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine — ran the same experiment in parallel, splitting nearly 2,000 mice between them. The mice were bred to ensure that they were genetically different enough that no single strain would be more or less susceptible to ageing-related diseases or the effects of the drug. They then gave the mice food that included rapamycin.

Problems formulating the feed meant that the teams couldn't start the treatment until the mice were rather older than they had planned — 20 months of age, or the equivalent of about 60 years in human terms. As it happened, this delay was a fortuitous accident. Compared with the non-drug-taking group, the lifespans of the mice given rapamycin increased by up to 14%, even though they were middle-aged when treatment began. Their life expectancy at 20 months shot up by 28% for the males and 38% for the females.

More here.

Hasok Chang in The Philosopher's Magazine:

What is the use of philosophy? That is a challenging question to answer in the modern intellectual landscape dominated by empirical science. There is a common impression that philosophers just sit around and engage in idle talk, while scientists make real investigations and deliver results that are useful as well as truthful. Even professional philosophers feel the pressure of the success of science and often respond with a subservient naturalism, which would reduce philosophy of mind to neurophysiology, epistemology to cognitive psychology, and metaphysics to the latest fashion in physics. A completion of such a naturalist project would be the end of philosophy as we know it; if philosophy’s subject matter is really science, then it would be best to leave it to scientists. It is absurd conceit to think that we philosophers can “think” better than anyone, so that we can step in and draw some wise conclusions from the scientific material, which scientists themselves are missing because they are sloppy or limited in their thinking.

I wish to resist this self-denigrating naturalism in philosophy, fashionable as it is these days. The relation between philosophy and science needs to be seen in a new light. A look back at the long-term history of scholarship will help us re-orientate ourselves here. There was a time when nearly all academic inquiry was called “philosophy”. But various scientific disciplines (and other practices such as law and medicine) gradually carved themselves out and left the realm of philosophy. After the departure of astronomy, mechanics, experimental physics, chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and so on, what is left in philosophy proper seems an empty shell. Our current academic discipline called “philosophy” became restricted and defined, as it were, against its own will.

Read more »

Maurice Isserman in The Nation:

In Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image, Michael Casey reports that local peasant women who paraded by Che’s corpse on October 9 with the permission of triumphant Bolivian officers “surreptitiously clipped locks of hair from Che’s head, saving themselves a future talisman.” A few weeks later, the journalist and novelist Jose Yglesias, reporting on Che’s death for The Nation, indulged his readers with a different sort of memorabilia. Yglesias wrote that like the relics of St. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Carmelite nun and mystic, Che’s hands “may well be with us for a long time to strengthen the nonreligious but barefoot Order–like Saint Teresa’s stoical Carmelites–of the guerrillas of South America.” The mythic appeal of the slain revolutionary, known to many today in Latin America as “San Ernesto,” has only grown in subsequent years. “Unwittingly, the Bolivian military delivered the world a lasting and sympathetic picture of the man they’d hunted down,” Casey writes. “They gave it a crucified Che.” Indeed, John Berger and other art critics have argued that Freddy Alborta’s photo of Che’s corpse bears a startling resemblance to Renaissance depictions of Jesus Christ at the moment he was brought down from the cross by the Romans.

Che hardly ever sat for a bad photo–even in death. But of all surviving photographs of him, one in particular stands out: the head-and-shoulders portrait of a bearded, longhaired, 31-year-old Che, wearing a bomber jacket and his trademark beret emblazoned with the comandante star. Casey makes this image the central concern of Che’s Afterlife, and in the book’s opening chapter he offers a vivid re-creation of the “frozen millisecond” when the photo was taken. The date was March 5, 1960; the location a spot near Havana’s Colón cemetery; the occasion a public funeral sponsored by the revolutionary government. The previous day a French munitions ship delivering arms to Cuba had mysteriously blown up in Havana harbor, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds. CIA involvement was suspected but never proven. Che, who had been at a meeting nearby in downtown Havana when the ship exploded, rushed to the docks and helped provide medical aid to the wounded and the dying.

In The National (Abu Dhabi), Suzy Hansen:

Some time after James Baldwin arrived in Istanbul he settled in Gumussuyu, a neighbourhood that hangs on the side of one of the city’s many hills, above the Golden Horn, the shores of Asia, and even the Sea of Marmara. Baldwin was a drinker, and one of his favourite neighbourhood spots was the Park Hotel. These days that glamorous meeting place is a terrible hulking carcass of a stunted building project, all grey, barren floors and trash heaps, stray dogs barking at nothing all hours of the day. Both vistas – the fabled view, the hovering skeleton – loom outside the living room windows of the great Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, who was largely responsible for Baldwin’s little-known sojourn in Turkey, where he lived on and off throughout the 1960s.

When I went to visit Cezzar last winter, a collection of letters between Baldwin and Cezzar had just been showcased in an Istanbul bookstore along with Baldwin’s translated works, and I told Cezzar I’d bought them. He scowled: “Don’t read Jimmy Baldwin in Turkish, for Christ’s sake.” Cezzar seemed proud of his book, and his special friendship with “Jimmy,” but he had priorities. He prized Baldwin as one thing above all else: a writer.

Now that Todd (The Improbable American) Shea is rivaling Aguy109, Fred Lapides, Dave Ranning, and Carlos (:-)) for frequency of commenting at 3QD, I thought I should post the story which accompanied the video about him that I had posted a couple of days ago. This is by Adam B. Ellick in the New York Times:

Mr. Shea is an unlikely person to reform Chikar’s decades of medical neglect. When he was 12, his mother died of a Valium overdose. By 18, he was addicted to crack cocaine.

In 1992, he moved from his native Maryland to Nashville to pursue a music career, he said, and spent the next decade playing in bars and restaurants around the country. At one point, he was forced to sell his own blood plasma for $40 a week to pay the bills.

He moved to New York City in 1998, and had a gig booked at CBGB, the famed music club, on Sept. 12, 2001. As he watched the World Trade Center burn and fall, he said, he promptly emptied his band van and used it over the next week to ferry meals to firefighters at Ground Zero.

He soon became addicted to rescue efforts, and volunteered in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. It was his first time overseas. After Hurricane Katrina, he said, he volunteered with another rescue organization. Then the earthquake hit Pakistan, and he left for a country he knew nothing about.

Once in Chikar, he met a local M.B.A. student, Afzel Makhdoom, who had just dragged his aunt out from under the rubble of his home. As soon as he could scrape together the money, Mr. Shea hired him.

“I had never met an American before,” said Mr. Makhdoom, now 24. “My first impression was: They just want to kill Muslims; it’s an invasion, and they’ll never go back home. But now we want to keep this American here.”

More here.

Steve Coll in The New Yorker:

The question of whether Osama bin Laden has ever visited the United States, a subject on which I have expended an unhealthy amount of energy in the course of various journalistic and biographical research, has now seemingly been settled. Osama was here for two weeks in 1979, it seems, and he visited Indiana and Los Angeles, among other places. He had a favorable encounter with an American medical doctor; he also reportedly met in Los Angeles with his spiritual mentor of the time, the Palestinian radical Abdullah Azzam. All this is according to a forthcoming book by Osama’s first wife, Najwa Bin Laden, and his son Omar Bin Laden, to be published in the autumn by St. Martin’s Press.

First, some context for the book’s disclosures:

In the autumn of 2005, while conducting research in Saudi Arabia for the book that became “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” I met a Saudi journalist named Khaled Batarfi, who had been a neighbor and friend of Osama Bin Laden in their teenage years. During one of our interviews, Batarfi offered an account of Osama’s early travels—to London, to Africa on Safari, and to the United States—that was suggestive of a young man who had more direct experience of the West than was generally understood.

More here.

Maelstrom, Roxy Paine’s magnificently intricate installation currently on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is to date the most prominent offspring of a rapidly evolving typology, lifesize tree golems rendered in stainless steel. Paine manages to steer these leafless “Dendroids,” as he calls them, between the Scylla of transparency and the Charibdis of mechanization, unyielding hazards to authorship of his own contrarian devising established by two other families of sculpture. On one side are Paine’s “Replicants,” portraits of notorious, untrustworthy plants and fungi fixed in eternal plastic with an exegetical fidelity to surpass the craftsmanship of the best diorama and Hollywood prop technicians. Here the hand dissolves like the Cheshire Cat around the grin of its expertise. But looming off to starboard are the industrial prototypes that have been tuned to glop, dip, carve, or spray potentially numberless unique artworks, induced but not touched by the artist. Most disconcerting about these machines is how undeniably ravishing are the objects they produce. The minimalist stalactites of Paint Dipper, the scholar’s canyons of Erosion Machine, and the impeccably grotesque, groovy meltdowns of SCUMAK, for example, flout the prerogatives of painting and sculpture not merely with sly, assembly-line standardization but in manifesting a literal and figurative gravity to die for.

more from David Brody at artcritical here.

From The Telegraph:

Like some deeply bruised cloud hovering thunderously above a summer picnic, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness threatens us still, more than a century since its publication.

Few works have entertained, excited and troubled minds as much. It has inspired music – including a forthcoming opera by Tarik O’Regan – and spawned numerous radio, theatre, film and television adaptations, the most famous being Apocalypse Now. TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men did more for the work’s projection towards a readership, quoting the phrase: “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.” It infused Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist and haunts both John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener and The Mission Song. VS Naipaul and Graham Greene were swept up by it, as were Nick Davies in writing Dark Heart along with Sven Lindquist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, Michaela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, and Tim Butcher’s Blood River. This weekend, at the Festival Hall in London, there will be two five-hour readings of the book, complete with piano accompaniment.

What is it about Heart of Darkness that has this horrid hold on our consciousness?

More here.

Mark Trodden in Cosmic Variance:

One of the more fun physics stories that I’ve seen recently is from an area of research quite removed from my own, but that I have found fascinating for a while now. I have been fortunate to have excellent condensed matter colleagues at both my recent institutions, and quite a number of them are interested in soft condensed matter – classical physics that describes the behavior of large numbers of particles, far from equilibrium, often when entropic considerations dominate the dynamics.

The field covers such diverse systems as the behavior of biological membranes and the dynamics of grain in silos, and contains many examples in which nontrivial geometry and topology lead to the possibility of discovering new phenomena that, unlike in my own field, can increasingly often be checked in a laboratory experiment designed and built in a relatively short time.

The story that caught my eye (via Wired Science) recently concerns the behavior of a system that is so simple that you would think we know all that there is to be known about it – falling sand.

In the video above, a stream of sand is allowed to fall over several feet, and is filmed using a high speed video camera that falls at the same speed as the sand. The result, as you can see, is that the sand forms “droplets” just as water would, even though most people would not think of granular materials as anything like a liquid.

More here.

From Nonrhotic:

In what can best be described as mildly coherent rambling, Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska, announced her resignation on July 3. During her speech, she alluded to a combination of factors that lead to her decision. Reading through the full text of her speech, I was able to extract 11 reasons that were buried deep amidst her wandering prose and tangled logic. They are paraphrased below (along with the relevant text from her speech in italics):

1. Defending myself against claims of ethics violations by political operatives is distracting me from doing my job as governor. Therefore, I resign.
“Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I’ve been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations … Every one – all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We’ve won! But it hasn’t been cheap – the State has wasted THOUSANDS of hours of YOUR time and shelled out some two million of YOUR dollars to respond to “opposition research” – that’s money NOT going to fund teachers or troopers – or safer roads.

2. Life is short. Time is too precious to waste. I am wasting my time as governor. Therefore, I resign to make better use of my time.
“Life is too short to compromise time and resources… Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time… to BUILD UP.”

3. I am expected to serve out the term I was elected for. But that would make me a quitter. Therefore, I am quitting because I don’t want to be a quitter.
“… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and “go with the flow. Nah, only dead fish “go with the flow”.”

More here.

Our own PD Smith in the Times Literary Supplement:

Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick (1851) is Philip Hoare’s guiding star in this beautifully written celebration of cetaceans, a word that comes from the Greek word ketos, sea monster. He glosses Melville’s fiction as a meditation on “man, whale, life, death”. Hoare’s book, like Moby-Dick, is on one level a rich source of information about these ancient mammals, from natural history to their role in our lives and myths. But Leviathan is also a deeply personal narrative that weaves together travelogue, memoir and literary history.

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael’s “splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world” and he seeks the solace of the sea. Disillusioned with city life, Hoare, who admits that he has “always been afraid of deep water”, also turns to the ocean – “the last true wilderness” – as an antidote to London, for the “place that had represented all my youthful aspirations now felt like a viral infection”. He follows in Ishmael’s wake, travelling from New York down to Cape Cod and New Bedford – aka the Whaling City, where he visits Father Mapple’s chapel – and then on to Nantucket. In the sea off Cape Cod, Hoare watches the whales: “I envied them the fact that they were always swimming; that they were always free”, and later visits Melville’s grave on “a bare Bronx hill”, where the writer lies next to his two sons who preceded him into the grave.

Even today, in the age of particle colliders and space exploration, we know precious little about some of the planet’s oldest inhabitants; as Hoare says, “cetaceans remain unfathomable.”

More here.

From Nature:

Human embryonic stem cells have been coaxed into forming sperm-like cells, researchers report today¹. The cells have some of the hallmarks of sperm — they can swim, for example — but require much more characterization before they can be embraced as an experimental model for the study of inherited diseases and infertility.

Meanwhile, the use of such cells to help infertile couples to have children remains a distant prospect; in several countries, including the UK, it would actually be illegal even if they were properly characterised. With approximately one in seven couples experiencing fertility problems, there is a strong push to develop a robust method for generating sperm and eggs for research. But researchers have struggled for years to produce reproductive cells from stem cells. The task is particularly difficult because it requires a complex form of cell division called meiosis, which reduces the number of chromosomes per cell by half.

More here.

David Robson in New Scientist:

Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.

In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of “self-organised criticality”. These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour – such as a swinging pendulum – and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

More here.

Martha Nussbaum in Dissent:

Before we approach the issue of same-sex marriage, we must define marriage. But marriage, it soon becomes evident, is no single thing. It is plural in both content and meaning. The institution of marriage houses and supports several distinct aspects of human life: sexual relations, friendship and companionship, love, conversation, procreation and child-rearing, mutual responsibility. Marriages can exist without each of these. (We have always granted marriage licenses to sterile people, people too old to have children, irresponsible people, and people incapable of love and friendship. Impotence, lack of interest in sex, and refusal to allow intercourse may count as grounds for divorce, but they don’t preclude marriage.) Marriages can exist even in cases where none of these is present, though such marriages are probably unhappy. Each of these important aspects of human life, in turn, can exist outside of marriage, and they can even exist all together outside of marriage, as is evident from the fact that many unmarried couples live lives of intimacy, friendship, and mutual responsibility, and have and raise children. Nonetheless, when people ask themselves what the content of marriage is, they typically think of this cluster of things.

More here.

Amos Barshad in New York Magazine:

Michael Jackson was mourned in ridiculous, over-the-top style this afternoon at a public funeral service more befitting of his legacy than his bigger fans would probably like to admit. Enjoy our slideshow of images from inside the Staples Center and of MJ remembrances from around the world.

More photos here.