Robert Cook-Deegan in American Scientist:

Harold Varmus’s new book, The Art and Politics of Science, is a timely memoir of a remarkable career. It hits the stores just as that career is taking a new turn: Varmus will be one of the foremost scientific advisers to the Obama administration.

In this memoir, Varmus traces the trajectory of his career, outlining events in roughly chronological order. He moves rapidly over his early life, touching on his childhood in New York City, his undergraduate years at Amherst, his graduate studies in English literature at Harvard and his training at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Armed with a medical degree but drawn to science, he did research in the U.S. Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as an alternative to military service during the Vietnam War (the “yellow beret” era, which was a golden age for NIH research).

Then in 1970 he took a scientific faculty position at the University of California at San Francisco, where researchers such as J. Michael Bishop and Herbert Boyer were doing groundbreaking research in molecular biology. Varmus entered into a long and conspicuously productive collaboration with Bishop, studying the molecular biology of cancer genes. The two men became famous and influential, primarily because they discovered cellular genes that could cause cancer when mutated and hijacked by RNA viruses. To those in the field, their laboratory was a formidable competitive force, filled with talented graduate students and postdocs attracted by hot science.

More here.

David Hare in the New York Review of Books:

Very well. I shall seek to describe the history of the wall.

On June 1, 2001, nine months into the second intifada, a Palestinian suicide bomber named Saeed Hotari crossed into Israel from the West Bank, and exploded himself at the entrance to the Dolphinarium discotheque on the beach in Tel Aviv, killing twenty-one civilians, most of them high school students. A further 132 people were injured. In response to the massacre, a grassroots movement grew up all over Israel calling itself Fence for Life. They argued, as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had argued ten years earlier, that the only way of protecting the country from infiltration by terrorists was by sealing itself off from the Palestinian territories, by removing the points of friction between the two communities. But separation would not be a purely military tactic. No, before he was murdered by a fellow Israeli, Rabin had been arguing something much more radical. “We have to decide on separation as a philosophy.”

There it is. Not just a wall. A wall would be a fact. But this wall is a philosophy, what one observer has called “a political code for shutting up shop.”

More here.

Jonathan S. Landay at McClatchy:

A growing number of U.S. intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials have concluded that there's little hope of preventing nuclear-armed Pakistan from disintegrating into fiefdoms controlled by Islamist warlords and terrorists, posing a greater threat to the U.S. than Afghanistan's terrorist haven did before 9/11.

“It's a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution,” said a U.S. intelligence official with long experience in Pakistan who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.

Pakistan's fragmentation into warlord-run fiefdoms that host al Qaida and other terrorist groups would have grave implications for the security of its nuclear arsenal; for the U.S.-led effort to pacify Afghanistan; and for the security of India, the nearby oil-rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia, the U.S. and its allies.

More here.

Jon Garvie in The Times of London:

Future social historians will note the extraordinary centrality of food to national discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Celebrity chefs and lifestyle experts attempt to reform bad habits. Doctors debate the health benefits and risks of modish diets, from raw greens to bone marrow. Class warriors deplore as snobbish dismissals of cheap battery-farm chickens. And the gulping majority grow obstinately fat on salty, sugary, pre-packaged slop, swelling the coffers of the multinationals and delivering fiscal nightmares to those who must foot the bill. But, despite this glut of media coverage, the provenance of most food is little known or understood. Whether at Tesco or farmers’ markets, consumers must take vendors’ avowals of freshness on trust. Few question exactly what knowledge a sell-by date imparts. Societies rely instead on myths, as Freidberg’s double-edged subtitle implies. The numinous meaning of freshness, as with all cults, is apprehended only vaguely by its followers.

Ancient cultures used preservative methods, such as salting and pickling, in order to extend the durability of produce for domestic use. Refrigeration delivered a paradigm shift by removing the site of production from the sight of consumers. The idea of freshness emerged to fill the conceptual ellipsis that resulted.

More here.

Adam Frank in Reality Base:

Why should a perfectly good equation that describes the evolution of the world (the wave function) go away just because someone made a measurement? To deal with this strange state of affairs, Hugh Everett proposed what would become the Many-Worlds Interpretation in the late 1950s (Bryce Dewitt did a lot of development on the idea, too). The Many-Worlds solution is, in a sense, a platonic one. The mathematical physics stays put, but our notion of what constitutes reality changes. Well, that is an understatement—it really, really changes.

According to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, the wave function is never suspended. Every time a measurement is made, the world splits off into as many copies as there are pieces (terms) in the wave functions. If you are the lab technician making the measurement, you split off into multiple copies, as does the entire universe with you. In each copy, a different value of the measurement is recorded. After the measurement, each copy world goes on evolving and splitting as more quantum events occur.

Sounds wacky, don’t it? Why would anyone believe in a universe that is endlessly splitting into (as far as we know) unobservable slightly-different versions of itself? Here is the point at which, as a physicist or philosopher, your biases will likely show themselves.

People will line up behind the Many-Worlds Interpretation because of its consistency. Its advantage is that it keeps the math whole. There is no special pleading about consciousness intruding on the measurement. There is no sense that our access to the world is limited. You have a beautiful equation. It describes the evolution of physical reality, and that is that.

Robert Mackey in the NYT's The Lede:

As Somini Sengupta reported in The Times earlier this week, despite a two-day pause in fighting, the Sri Lankan government has “rebuffed international appeals to protect civilians trapped in a war zone in its northeast.” Now some visual evidence of the damage that fighting has caused is coming to light.

Ms. Sengupta explained on Sunday why Human Rights Watch calls this small area of northern Sri Lanka “one of the most dangerous places in the world.”

An estimated 100,000 ethnic Tamils are trapped in a deadly and shrinking five-square-mile wedge of land in northeastern Sri Lanka, where the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, fighting for an ethnic homeland for 25 years, have effectively held them hostage as a civilian shield.

A video report from Channel 4 News in London on Thursday (embedded below), showing scores of civilian victims killed last week in the crossfire between Sri Lanka’s government and the rebel Tamil Tigers (officially known as t is clear that the L.T.T.E.), in a part of the country off-limits to journalists, is difficult to watch. The images are as disturbing as those that filled television screens during the conflicts in Bosnia in the 1990s but, as Channel 4’s Lindsey Hilsum points out in her report, this bloody war, now possibly in its last throes, has been taking place largely out of sight of the international media. As in the final months of the war in Bosnia, the failure of the combatants to refrain from shelling encircled, densely-populated civilian pockets is producing shocking results. Channel 4’s Alex Thomson wrote on Thursday in an email newsletter, “You have to ask: is Sri Lanka becoming another Srebenica?”

Terry Eagleton in Commonweal:

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism? Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section labeled “Atheism,” hosting anti-God manifestos by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others, and might even now be contemplating another marked “Congenital Skeptic with Mild Baptist Leanings”? Why, just as we were confidently moving into a posttheological, postmetaphysical, even posthistorical era, has the God question broken out anew?

Can one simply put it down to falling towers and fanatical Islamists? I don’t really think we can. Certainly the New Atheists’ disdain for religion did not sprout from the ruins of the World Trade Center. While some of the debate took its cue from there, 9/11 was not really about religion, any more than the thirty-year-long conflict in Northern Ireland was over papal infallibility. In fact, radical Islam generally understands exceedingly little about its own religious faith, and there is good evidence to suggest that its actions are, for the most part, politically driven.

That does not mean these actions have no religious impact or significance. Islamic fundamentalism confronts Western civilization with the contradiction between the West’s own need to believe and its chronic incapacity to do so.

“Sex is a political condition.” —Kate Millet

Toward a Better Love
Roque Dalton

No one disputes that sex
is a condition in the world of the couple:
from there, tenderness and its wild branches.

No one disputes that sex
is a domestic condition:
from there, kids,
nights in common
and days divided
(he, looking for bread in the street,
in offices or factories;
she, in the rear guard of domestic functions,
in the strategy and tactic of the kitchen
that allows survival in a common struggle
at least to the end of the month).

No one disputes that sex
in an economic condition:
it’s enough to mention prostitution,
fashion,
the sections in the dailies that are only for her
or only for him.

Where the hassles begin
is when a woman says
sex is a political condition.

Because when a woman says
sex is a political condition
she can begin to stop being just a woman in herself
in order to become a woman for herself,
establishing the woman in woman
from the basis of her humanity
on not of her sex,
knowing that the magic deodorant with a hint of lemon
and soap that voluptuously caresses her skin
are made by the same manufacturer that makes napalm
knowing the labors of the homes themselves
are labors of a social class to which that home belongs,
that the difference between the sexes
burns much better in the loving depth of night
when all those secrets that kept us
masked and alien are revealed.

Translation, Jack Hirschman
—from the collection Poetry Like Bread; Curbstone Press, 1994

One night after Christmas last year, in a dark, well-upholstered restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the American poet Frederick Seidel, an elegant man of 73 with an uncommonly courtly manner, told me a story about poetry’s power to disturb. “It was years ago,” Seidel explained in his measured voice, “in the days when I had an answering machine. I’d left my apartment, briefly, to go outside to get something, and when I came back there was a message. When I played it, there was a woman’s voice, a young woman’s voice sounding deeply aroused, saying: ‘Frederick Seidel . . . Frederick Seidel . . . you think you’re going to live. You think you’re going to live. But you’re not. You’re not going to live. You’re not going to live. . . .’ All this extraordinary, suggestive heavy breathing, getting, in the tone of it, more and more intensely sexual, more gruesome, and then this sort of explosion of sound from this woman, and: ‘You’re . . . not . . . going . . . to . . . live.’ ” Seidel paused. The bright cries of a group of young women giving a baby shower in the adjoining booth rose and fell behind the bare crown of Seidel’s gray head. “So,” he continued, “the first thing I did was call a girlfriend. And the woman said, ‘I’m coming over.’ And did. And listened to this thing. And burst into tears. Because it really was horrific.” Another friend, a federal judge, also listened, insisting that Seidel call the police immediately and tell them he’d received a death threat. “They came by and they said: ‘It’s real. Have you published a book recently?’ I had. And that was it, really. Meaning nothing happened. But,” Seidel said, his large blue eyes brightening, “it was the most severe review I’ve ever received.”

more from the NY Times here.

This book has divided the world. The French love it, and gave it not only the Prix Goncourt but the Académie Française’s Prix de la Littérature as well. The British are split – Antony Beevor loved it, Peter Kemp hated it. The survivor-writer Jorge Semprún admired it; Claude Lanzmann, the maker of Shoah, first hated it, then changed his mind. Most Americans and Canadians loathe it. Why? And who is right and wrong? That should be a naïve question, since wildly differing responses to the same book are perfectly normal. But here there is, I think, a right and a wrong answer, though not simple ones. Those who admire The Kindly Ones are right, but those who loathe it are not completely wrong. It is half a work of genius and half a work of gratuitous perversion.

more from Literary Review here.

Every once in a while some woman gets fed up with the constant news of war, poverty, greed, environmental degradation, and corruption, and publicly growls, “You know, if women ran the world, it would be a better place.” Detractors immediately howl back, reminding us of the plague that was Thatcherism, but it turns out that we don’t need a matriarchy to improve the world. Just improving the lives of women, guaranteeing their rights, and allowing them to decide their own fates independent of religious or societal control would help piece our world back together. Muhammad Yunus started the Grameen Bank to offer microloans to the rural poor, allowing them to start small businesses and work their way out of poverty. He quickly noticed that women allowed to earn their own incomes “show remarkable determination to have fewer children, educate the ones they have, and participate actively in our democracy.” By 2007, 97 percent of his borrowers were women, and he had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

more from The Smart Set here.

From The Telegraph:

With his horn-rimmed glasses, dark suits and generally lugubrious demeanour, it is plain to see how Dr Kissinger, the Presidential National Security Advisor, was the chief inspiration for Peter Sellers’ Dr Strangelove – who, as the world is about to end, gleefully informs the bigwigs in the bunker that nuclear annihilation won’t be too bad: “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. I am saying only 10 to 20 million people killed, tops, depending upon the breaks.”

Despite spending his adult life in America, Kissinger hasn’t lost or modified his sonorous Teutonic accent, “perhaps because he never wanted to,” according to Evi Kurz, in this fascinating and suggestive biography. Though he has ascended to great heights in the US – having been Nixon’s Secretary of State and the chairman, advisor or director of everything from the Chase Manhattan Bank to NBC and American Express – Kissinger remains the immigrant German: courtly, enigmatic, theatrical and somewhat furtive. There is nothing open or benign about his personality – his cunning commands respect, but not affection.

More here.

From Salon:

Goodall has remained a fascinating figure partly because she's kept one foot outside of mainstream science. She's an outspoken advocate of animal rights and also the rare scientist who talks openly about mystical experiences — from her transformative encounters in the wild to a ghostly vision she once had of her dead husband. Now 75, Goodall is a larger-than-life figure who looms over the field of primatology. Today she spends less time with her beloved Gombe chimps than traveling the world as a U.N. messenger of peace, campaigning for environmental causes and promoting her Roots and Shoots program for young nature lovers.

I caught up with Goodall after she received the Leakey Prize, awarded to “scientists who transcend the boundaries of their disciplines.” The prize was fitting since it was famed paleontologist Louis Leakey who first asked Goodall to conduct a field study of chimpanzees. Leakey's choice was remarkable, as Goodall had not been to college and had no scientific training. As she explains, Leakey picked her “because he wanted to send somebody into the field with an unbiased mind.”

As I've read the accounts of your early field work at Gombe, I'm struck by how much time you were out in the field, alone with the chimpanzees.

It was absolutely amazing. It wasn't only a beautiful place, surrounded by this timeless world, but also, everything I saw with the chimpanzees was new. I mean, how lucky can you get?

More here.

If you haven't seen these already, over at the ACLU, memos from the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department (sounds Orwellian in this context) authorizing and blessing torture. “[F]earsome word-and-thought-defying,” as someone once said of another bureaucrat's complicity in crimes.

Johann Hari in The Indpendent:

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live.” In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Read more »

This piece seems to come from the crankier, nuttier side of conservatism, in the Washington Post:

On any American street, or in any airport or mall, you see the same sad tableau: A 10-year-old boy is walking with his father, whose development was evidently arrested when he was that age, judging by his clothes. Father and son are dressed identically — running shoes, T-shirts. And jeans, always jeans. If mother is there, she, too, is draped in denim.

Writer Daniel Akst has noticed and has had a constructive conniption. He should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He has earned it by identifying an obnoxious misuse of freedom. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he has denounced denim, summoning Americans to soul-searching and repentance about the plague of that ubiquitous fabric, which is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche.

It is, he says, a manifestation of “the modern trend toward undifferentiated dressing, in which we all strive to look equally shabby.” Denim reflects “our most nostalgic and destructive agrarian longings — the ones that prompted all those exurban McMansions now sliding off their manicured lawns and into foreclosure.” Jeans come prewashed and acid-treated to make them look like what they are not — authentic work clothes for horny-handed sons of toil and the soil. Denim on the bourgeoisie is, Akst says, the wardrobe equivalent of driving a Hummer to a Whole Foods store — discordant.

Long ago, when James Dean and Marlon Brando wore it, denim was, Akst says, “a symbol of youthful defiance.” Today, Silicon Valley billionaires are rebels without causes beyond poses, wearing jeans when introducing new products. Akst's summa contra denim is grand as far as it goes, but it only scratches the surface of this blight on Americans' surfaces. Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults (“Seinfeld,” “Two and a Half Men”) and cartoons for adults (“King of the Hill”). Seventy-five percent of American “gamers” — people who play video games — are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote. In their undifferentiated dress, children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies (the six — so far — “Batman” adventures and “Indiana Jones and the Credit-Default Swaps,” coming soon to a cineplex near you). Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy's catechism of leveling — thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly.

more from The Walrus here.

Here Bullet
Brian Turner

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.