…which I sadly will miss since I'll be en route to South Africa. This panel promises to be tour de force.

Albert Einstein shattered previous ideas about time, but left many pivotal questions unanswered: Does time have a beginning? An end? Why does it move in only one direction? Is it real, or something our minds impose on reality? Journalist John Hockenberry leads a distinguished panel, including renowned physicist Sir Roger Penrose and prominent philosopher David Albert, as they explore the nature of time.

David Albert, Sean Carroll, George Ellis, Michael Heller, John Hockenberry, Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, and Sir Roger Penrose. I don't if there are tickets left, but I'd love a report on the panel from one of our readers, or maybe Sean will post something.

Jesse Smith in The Smart Set:

To most of the American public, chicanery is pretty gauche right now: Bernie Madoff, risky bank investments, torture memos, Blago. Yet some deception is just too ingrained in our heritage to easily dismiss. Which is why competitors from around the world recently gathered in Ocean City, Maryland to celebrate and compete in the only American art form grounded in trickery. The Ward World Championship is the annual meet-up of wildfowl carvers, those artists with centuries-old ties to the decoy makers who carved birds not to decorate shelves or long tables of a small town's convention center, but to attract and kill birds that migrated along the nation's shores.

To be fair, this is trickery targeting not the human world, but the animal. Still, Ocean City is an oddly appropriate setting for such a celebration. It's one of the few cities on the lower Delmarva peninsula — one of the historic centers of decoy making and bird carving — with enough motel rooms and a large enough exhibition space to host such an event. But like most resort towns of the northern East Coast, it also trades in appropriation. I stayed in the Flamingo Motel while I was there, despite being about 1,100 miles from the nearest wild flamingo. My dining options included the Olive Tree and the Crabcake Factory.

More here.

From PRWeb:

The debut of a major new international literary talent is a rare and heartening event. THE WISH MAKER, the first novel by twenty-four-year-old Ali Sethi, combines classic storytelling instincts, an eye-opening portrait of a suddenly important nation that Americans are intensely curious about, and a remarkable back story. THE WISH MAKER has already been highlighted in USA Today's “Book Buzz” column and foreign rights have been sold in six countries to date. At once a fresh and affecting coming-of-age story, a riveting family saga, and a hip, witty social commentary, Sethi's novel vividly evokes the pungent texture of daily life in his native Pakistan, particularly for women, as well as his country's roiling social and political currents.

The son of prominent Pakistani journalists, Sethi went to Harvard University, where he studied with the novelists Zadie Smith and Amitav Ghosh as well as the critic James Wood. He has written in the Op Ed pages of The New York Times about Pakistan's “slow-motion emergency,” which has led it to the brink of widespread violence and chaos, and more recently about the attack in Lahore on the Sri Lankan cricket team.

In THE WISH MAKER, Sethi tells an intimate yet sweeping tale set mainly in the 1990s – a story of two cousins, a boy and girl, who grow up in the same household, unexpectedly follow very different paths, and reunite after a series of events that have irrevocably changed them and their country. It encompasses Benazir Bhutto, the heady promise of democracy, and the recurring nightmare of military intervention; Bollywood movie stars and American TV shows and the different kinds of forbidden love they inspire.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

How suggestively their names intertwined from the start: Masters, with its echoes of bondage and onanism, and Johnson, that venerable euphemism for penis. If they hadn't been the most famous sexologists of their day, they might have opened an S&M club in Tribeca. Gini, with her purring smile, would have greeted the customers; Bill would have stayed in the back room, testing the hoists and chains. Which was only a couple of degrees removed from what they did in real life. Their partnership began in St. Louis in the mid-1950s, when William Masters, an ob-gyn and fertility specialist at Washington University, decided to launch a scientific inquiry into human sexuality. Unlike his predecessor, Alfred Kinsey, Masters proposed something far more immersive than questionnaires: direct observation of the body's procreative functions, with each pulse and quiver painstakingly recorded.

He began in a small way by spying on prostitutes (conscripted with the local vice squad's help and the Catholic archbishop's blessing). When one of his subjects suggested he find a female partner, Masters settled on an unlikely candidate: an unemployed, twice-divorced mother with two small kids and no degree. Initially hired as Masters's secretary, Virginia Johnson quickly proved her worth in the lab, efficiently gathering personal histories and sounding the notes of empathy that were absent from Masters's cool register.

More here.

Hello,

The voting round of our prize (details here) is over. A total of 2,655 votes were cast for the 171 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller, a South Tyrolean graphic artist, has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own blogs. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. The Science Babe: The Physics of High Heels
2. My Genes and Me: Journey to My Genes
3. Southern Fried Science: The ecological disaster that is dolphin safe tuna
4. In The Pipeline: Your Paper Is A Sack Of Raving Nonsense. Thank You.
5. 3 Quarks Daily: Giambattista Della Porta of Naples: How to Turn a Woman Green
6. Daylight Atheism: The Age of Wonder
7. Dot Physics: Physics of Fantastic Contraption I
8. Mauka to Makai: The Ocean's Big pHat Problem
9. Cocktail Party Physics: The Universe Makes A Lotta Gas
10. Unitary Flow: Smooth Quantum Mechanics
11. The Primate Diaries: Male Chauvinist Chimps or the Meat Market of Public Opinion?
12. Mauka to Makai: Baby-Making
13. Tom Paine’s Ghost: Dr. Temple Grandin
14. In The Pipeline: Things I Won’t Work With: Triazadienyl Fluoride
15. The Intersection: Singled Out
16. Expression Patterns: A Squishy Topic
17. Observations of a Nerd: The End of the Age of Man?
18. Tetrapod Zoology: Passerine birds fight dirty, a la Velociraptor
19. Daylight Atheism: Bands of Iron
20. Observations of a Nerd: A Marine Biologist’s Story

We'll announce the seven finalists on June 11.

Good luck!

Abbas

Sughra Raza. Highway Fog. 2003.

Acrylic on canvas.

Digital photograph outside the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, 2008.

William Deresiewicz in The Nation:

To be fair, the problem lies less in the field's goals than in its claims. Much of its opposition is misguided and out-of-date. For a long time, evolutionary approaches to human behavior were discredited by the specter of Social Darwinism. More recently, the concept of a unitary human nature has been condemned as a form of bourgeois universalism–that is, of disguised ethnocentrism. But those who reject the notion of human psychology as a product of evolution (that is, of nature rather than culture) would undoubtedly recoil at the idea that human physiology is not a product of evolution. The only alternative is creationism. And if our bodies have evolved, then so have our minds, which a materialist philosophy (one that doesn't depend on supernatural entities like the Christian soul) must regard as products of our bodies–of our brains, nerves, sense organs and so forth. Surely no one would dispute that there is a universal bee nature or dog nature or chimpanzee nature. Why not then acknowledge, at least in principle, a universal human nature, however various its elaborations in culture?

“Making money,” writes Kirn, “didn’t interest me. While my classmates signed up for on-campus ‘face-to-faces’ with Wall Street investment firms … I scanned the horizon for another test to take, another contest to compete in. … For me, wealth and power were trivial by-products in the great generational tournament of aptitude. The ranking itself was the essential prize.” Here, we see, the young Kirn was a romantic. But I doubt he was quite the deranged romantic the old Kirn makes him out to be. His telling of the tale of his cynicism is more cynical than the cynicism it describes. At Princeton, he was an approval-seeking, and approval-deprived poet and playwright who at times suffered a debilitating drug habit. He got laid, it seems to me, a fair amount. He read W. B. Yeats and John Berryman and wrote plays with titles like Soft White Kids in Leather (which, by the way, was later staged at the Edinburgh Festival). Though the son of a lawyer, he was too often a poor boy in a rich man’s house. A frank memoir about this experience, one undetermined by the publishing trends of the moment, might have been funny, even—when young Kirn hits bottom—moving. But this market-tuned book, fastened to a social problem about which its author has little of substance to say, and sweetened with just enough Hollywood-style titillation, seems destined to be made into one of those movies that nobody sees. No matter. Kirn has already cashed out. The con is complete.

more from Christian Lorentzen at n+1 here.

Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance:

If someone believes that abortion really is murder, talk of the reproductive freedom of the mother isn’t going to carry much weight — nobody has the right to murder another person. Supporters of abortion rights don’t say “No, this is one case where murder is completely justified.” Rather, they say “No, the fetus is not a person, so abortion is not murder.” The crucial question (I know, this is not exactly an astonishing new insight) is whether a fetus is really a person.

I have nothing original to add to the debate over when “personhood” begins. But there is something to say about how we decide questions like that. And it takes us directly back to the previous discussion about marriage and fundamental physics. The upshot of which is: how you think about the universe, how you conceptualize the natural world around us, obviously is going to have an enormous impact on how you decide questions like “When does personhood begin?”

In a pre-scientific world, life was — quite understandably — thought of as something intrinsically different from non-life. This view could be taken to different extremes; Plato gave voice to one popular tradition, by claiming that the human soul was a distinct, incorporeal entity that actually occupied a human body. These days we know a lot more than they did back then.

More here.

Marc Weingarten in Salon:

It was snowing hard when the bank called Nick Popovich. They needed to grab a Gulfstream in South Carolina now. Not tomorrow. Tonight.

All commercial and private planes were grounded, but Nick Popovich wasn't one to turn down a job. So he waited for the storm to clear long enough to charter a Hawker jet from Chicago into South Carolina. There was just one detail: No one had told Popovich about the heavily armed white supremacist militia that would be guarding the aircraft when he arrived.

But then again, no one had told the militia about Popovich, a brawny and intimidating man who has been jailed and shot at and has faced down more angry men than a prison warden. When Popovich and two of his colleagues arrived that evening at a South Carolina airfield, they were met by a bunch of nasty-looking thugs with cocked shotguns. “They had someone in the parking lot with binoculars,” Popovich says, recalling the incident. “When we went to grab the plane, one of them came out with his weapon drawn and tells us we better get out of there.” Undeterred, Popovich continued toward the plane until he felt a gun resting on his temple.

More here.

My Voice gets Black Quiet & I want to Fly
Jim Bell

I’m so tired
of these brown
patient
hills
sitting
over my
shoulder
like buddha
with bumps
laughing
&
no more corn
fields
no more pole
vault
no more
sad
irish eyes
wildly
whacking
at 1950’s
looking

for a mother’s
face to touch
& love
& bring back
home
healed
soft
sober

a father’s
rage
to bottle
& send
back
to his mother’s
buried ground

& the sound
of your lovely
naked voice
leaves
me screaming
at the edge
of an ocean
I want to grow
old & die in

from: Crossing the Bar; poems by Jim Bell
Slate Roof Publishing, Northfield, MA ,2005

From The Boston Globe:

The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word “anesthesia” itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city's physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever.

More here.

Paul Berman in The New York Times:

The single most thrilling event in Gabriel García Márquez’s life, judging from the biography by Gerald Martin, took place in February 1950, when the novelist, who was 22 and not yet a novelist, though he was already trying to be, accompanied his mother to the backwoods town where he had spent his early childhood. This was a place called Aracataca, in the “banana zone” of northern Colombia. His grandfather’s house was there, and his mother had decided to sell it.

García Márquez himself has described this trip in his autobiography, “Living to Tell the Tale.” But Martin supplies, as it were, the fact-checked version — a product of the 17 years of research that went into “Gabriel García Márquez: A Life,” together with the benedictions of the novelist himself, who has loftily observed, “Oh well, I suppose every self-respecting writer should have an English biographer.” In “Living to Tell the Tale,” García Márquez says that, upon arriving at Aracataca, he entered the house and inspected the rooms. The English biographer, by contrast, observes that García Márquez has also said he never entered. Either way, he saw the house. Childhood vistas presented themselves, and vistas prompted thoughts.

More here.

NOTE: TODAY IS THE LAST DAY FOR VOTING.

Dear Reader,

In case you didn't see it the first time it was posted, you can click here to see the prize announcement which has all the details.

If you'd like to check out the final list of nominees (with links to the posts) for the prize, click here.

When you are ready to vote, click here. Remember, voting ends at midnight on June 8, 2009.

Thanks for participating in our contest, and best of luck to the nominees!

Cheers,

Abbas

Isaiah Berlin used to say that people were his landscape. In the first volume of his letters, Flourishing, edited by Henry Hardy and covering the years 1928 to 1946, he went so far as to declare a positive dislike of nature, suggesting that love of sublime landscapes was linked with reactionary romanticism. It is true that his focus was always on human beings, and this second volume shows him finding fulfilment among them as never before. Returning from war work in the British embassy in Washington, becoming once again and then ceasing to be a bachelor don, taking up the history of ideas and achieving, through a series of radio talks, a degree of celebrity about which he was highly ambivalent, immersing himself in the internecine struggles of All Souls and Oxford, giving advice to heads of state and officials running government agencies – these and other aspects of Berlin’s life are vividly captured in this absorbingly readable second selection. There could hardly be a more intimate portrait of Berlin than that which emerges from these letters. But the man himself is not so easily captured, and sometimes appears quite different from the one who seemed always to feel at home in the world.

more from John Gray at Literary Review here.

With the e-book loomingas an ever-larger presence in the publishing world, it is impossible to resist looking at earlier such shifts. As Byrne notes, the reproduction of a voice became more “real” to the listener than the raw voice itself. The live performance becomes less authentic than the multi-layered, painstakingly assembled released version of a song. Could the same be said for e-books? What is the authentic “thing” of a book — is it the words themselves? Does it matter if they’re in manuscript form or on a page between two covers? I’m interested in his point that “technology feigns neutrality.” Is an e-book reader simply a delivery system? Or are there hidden ways that it’s altering how we read, how we perceive of books, how we imagine books should be formatted and navigated? Can an e-book reader be the exception —is it indeed a neutral technology? David Byrne’s first-person photo book “Bicycle Diaries” is coming out this fall. Looks like it’ll be available in hardcover and on CD — but not as an e-book.

more from Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times here.

Twenty years ago, John Updike published a memoir, “Self-­Consciousness,” which opens with an extended reminiscence of his hometown. The author has been stranded for the evening while his mother and daughter are at the movies, and he walks the streets of Shillington, Pa., in a light rain, reliving the past in the incantatory detail with which he informed and illuminated his fiction, summoning up the names of departed local merchants, of his teachers and elementary school classmates, recalling the material texture of his childhood right on down to the candies, magazines and coloring books offered for sale at the variety store, recording the essence of his time amongst us. “The street,” he writes, “the house where I had lived, seemed blunt, modest in scale, simple; this deceptive simplicity composed their precious, mystical secret, the conviction of whose existence I had parlayed into a career, a message to sustain a writer book after book.” That message, that testimony of an individual and recollective consciousness as it relives and reviews the matter of a lifetime and grapples with the effects of aging, disease, decline and death, is the focus of Updike’s final collection of new fiction.

more from T. Coraghessan Boyle at the NY Times here.