A car pulls up outside a Georgian house in Soho. Out steps Salman Rushdie. He's dressed entirely in black – black overcoat, black scarf, black jacket, black sweater, trousers, shoes… The only thing not completely black is his shirt and that's only because it's got a few white stripes on it. He looks – actually, he looks just like a hit-man. In his hand he carries a polythene bag full of books. When he comes upstairs, I find myself peering through the opaque plastic trying to make out the titles. One of them turns out to be the French version of his last novel, The Enchantress of Florence – now out in paperback. The book, declares Rushdie with satisfaction, has done terrifically well in France, getting 'the sort of rave reviews you find yourself making up in the bath'.
Over here, it had a more mixed reception, but then, as Rushdie says of himself, 'I'm not the sort of writer who ever gets five out of 10 reviews. I tend to get 11 out of 10, or minus one out of 10. That's all right, though; it shows that people are having strong reactions.' The reactions to Rushdie have been so strong in certain sections of the British press that you might expect him to be wary of interviews – hostile even. In fact, he's relaxed, genial and prone to bursts of Mutley-like chuckling. Plopping one Canderel into his cup of tea, he sets his BlackBerry down on the table beside him. Over the next hour it regularly chugs with incoming emails.
When the 26-year-old Charles Darwin sailed into the Galápagos Islands in 1835 onboard the HMS Beagle, he took little notice of a collection of birds that are now intimately associated with his name. The naturalist, in fact, misclassified as grosbeaks some of the birds that are now known as Darwin’s finches. After Darwin returned to England, ornithologist and artist John Gould began to make illustrations of a group of preserved bird specimens brought back in the Beagle’s hold, and the artist recognized them all to be different species of finches. From Gould’s work, Darwin, the self-taught naturalist, came to understand how the finches’ beak size must have changed over the generations to accommodate differences in the size of seeds or insects consumed on the various islands. “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends,” he noted in The Voyage of The Beagle, published after his return in 1839.
Twenty years later Darwin would translate his understanding of finch adaptation to conditions on different islands into a fully formed theory of evolution, one emphasizing the power of natural selection to ensure that more favorable traits endure in successive generations. Darwin’s theory, core features of which have withstood critical scrutiny from scientific and religious critics, constituted only the starting point for an endlessly rich set of research questions that continue to inspire present-day scientists. Biologists are still seeking experimental results that address how natural selection proceeds at the molecular level—and how it affects the development of new species.
This flag of Palestine is here to symbolize our solidarity with the innocents being massacred and maimed in unbelievable numbers in Gaza. All justifications for the brutal Israeli assault are utter nonsense.
Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.
On 5 November the Israeli government sealed all the ways into and out of Gaza. Food, medicine, fuel, parts for water and sanitation systems, fertiliser, plastic sheeting, phones, paper, glue, shoes and even teacups are no longer getting through in sufficient quantities or at all. According to Oxfam only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of 4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October this year and 564 in December 2005.
Recently Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking into financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription drugs. He hasn't had to look very hard.
Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.
Legally, physicians may use drugs that have already been approved for a particular purpose for any other purpose they choose, but such use should be based on good published scientific evidence. That seems not to be the case here. Biederman's own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were, as The New York Times summarized the opinions of its expert sources, “so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive.”
In June, Senator Grassley revealed that drug companies, including those that make drugs he advocates for childhood bipolar disorder, had paid Biederman $1.6 million in consulting and speaking fees between 2000 and 2007. Two of his colleagues received similar amounts. After the revelation, the president of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the chairman of its physician organization sent a letter to the hospital's physicians expressing not shock over the enormity of the conflicts of interest, but sympathy for the beneficiaries: “We know this is an incredibly painful time for these doctors and their families, and our hearts go out to them.”
In a countrywhere 300 million people live on less than a dollar a day, Amit Kumar—nicknamed “Dr. Horror” by the Indian media after his arrest last winter for heading an illicit global kidney-transplant ring—had little trouble finding homegrown organ donors. One favorite hunting ground was a strip of restaurants, shops, and hovels near an Islamic shrine, or dargah, in Mahim, a predominantly Muslim precinct of Mumbai. Devotees of the dargah, which attracts people of all faiths, donate money to restaurants to help feed the beggars who cluster there. Last June, walking past one such restaurant whose kitchen extends to the sidewalk, I saw a dozen or so men huddled within scorching distance of giant cauldrons in which meat and potatoes simmered. Expressions glazed and clothing in tatters, the men watched, motionless and silent, their patience unwavering. I felt as if I were looking at a still photo.
Kumar, who’s now on trial, has told officials that he sent his agents to offer such men anywhere from $500 to $2,500 for a kidney. Elsewhere, in the fast-growing towns of states like Haryāna and Uttar Pradesh, Kumar’s ring also went after newly arrived migrant workers seeking jobs.
The massive rural-to-urban labor migration that has been transforming China since the late 1980s—an estimated 130 million people—is unprecedented in that nation’s history. Unprompted by direct ecological or political factors such as famine, war, or the forced relocation of population groups under draconian state policy, migration in post-Mao China is more likely to be instead the result of structural forces (economic need and consequences of agricultural reform) that are beyond the control of individual farmers. Motivated by the search for opportunities to improve their own lives, rural people have taken the initiative, making decisions to shape their own destinies—and fostering unforeseen entrepreneurial individualism in the process. Above all, restless young village women have assumed a major role in the current population shift, establishing a brand-new identity as dagongmei (literally, “working sisters”) in the booming industrial cities in China’s coastal areas, contributing to what sociologists call the “feminization of the global workforce.”
In Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, Leslie T. Chang ’91, who spent a decade in China as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, delivers a vivid portrayal both of the dynamics of this internal migration and of women migrants as active players in globalization and local social and economic change.
“We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking.” Do we like sitting by the fire?
We do.
Does it make us happy to think? It does. For a while. But pretty soon don’t we start worrying, now that we’ve stepped away from the world, that the world is slipping past without us? Don’t we wonder, when we come back, Am I still here?
Oh, the strange mix of revulsion and pleasure Z and I felt when we returned from five days under the sky in the middle of Idaho and watched the e-mail counter piling up: 21, 32, 58, 74 e-mails! Z has 74 e-mails! Z is indeed part of it all! Z was missed! Z exists!
It’s not just poetic alliteration that makes the pat phrase “a butterfly fluttered by” so appropriate. The insects, although not always that speedy, often take a flight path that involves so many erratic dips and turns that they almost look out of control. But it’s not because they can’t do any better: Such unpredictable flight is how butterflies evade birds and other predators. However, most butterflies are brightly colored, which would seem to counter their evasiveness by making them easier to spot and track. “The question always bothered me,” says Thomas Eisner, a biologist at Cornell University. “Why are butterflies flaunting their visibility?” As Eisner and Benjamin Jantzen, a doctoral candidate now at Carnegie Mellon University, report in the October 28 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a butterfly’s ability to evade and its blatant pigmentation may go hand in hand.
The first step was to find out what physical feature of butterflies allows them to move so erratically. It’s been known for about a century that the front wings in butterflies are the ones driven by the insect’s muscles; the hind wings are passively coupled to the front ones. Eisner decided to investigate just what the back wings were doing by trimming them away bit by bit. To his surprise, he found that if he removed the entire hind wing, the insects had no problem flying. Indeed, when Eisner went on to test an extensive list of butterfly and moth species, he found that without exception they were all capable of sustained flight with only their front wings. “It is pretty startling that they’re that overendowed with lifting surface,” says Jantzen.
When it comes to science, Barack Obama is no better than many of us. Today he joins the list of shame of those in public life who made scientifically unsupportable statements in 2008.
Closer to home, Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith faltered on the science of food, while Kate Moss, Oprah Winfrey and Demi Moore all get roastings for scientific illiteracy.
The Celebrities and Science Review 2008, prepared by the group Sense About Science, identifies some of the worst examples of scientific illiteracy among those who profess to know better – including top politicians.
Mr Obama and John McCain blundered into the MMR vaccine row during their presidential campaigns. “We've seen just a skyrocketing autism rate,” said President-elect Obama. “Some people are suspicious that it's connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it,” he said.
His words were echoed by Mr McCain. “It's indisputable that [autism] is on the rise among children, the question is what's causing it,” he said. “There's strong evidence that indicates it's got to do with a preservative in the vaccines.”
Exhaustive research has failed to substantiate any link to vaccines or any preservatives. The rise in autism is thought to be due to an increased awareness of the condition.
“Waltz With Bashir” is a memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film.
Directed by Ari Folman, an Israeli filmmaker whose struggle to make sense of his experience as a soldier in the Lebanon war of 1982 shapes its story, “Waltz” is by no means the world’s only animated documentary, a phrase that sounds at first like a cinematic oxymoron. Movies like Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” and Brett Morgen’s “Chicago 10” have used animation to make reality seem more vivid and more strange, producing odd and fascinating experiments.
But Mr. Folman has gone further, creating something that is not only unique but also exemplary, a work of astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral power.
That it is also a cartoon is not incidental to this achievement.
Robyn Creswell contemplates the provocations of Faisal Devji, whose fascinating new book upturns conventional accounts of al Qa’eda by investigating ‘the rich inner life of jihad’.
From The National:
The field of jihadi studies, situated at the crossroads of policy-making, intelligence work, journalism and academic research, sprang up almost overnight following the attacks of September 11. It now boasts all the infrastructure that comes with the discovery of a glittering new frontier, as fascinating in its way as superstrings or Martian ice. Conferences, courses and research centres are devoted to explaining the intricacies of holy war. Amidst this mushroom patch of interlocking institutions and individuals, the work of Faisal Devji – an assistant professor at the New School for Social Research in New York – sticks out like a rare flower. Devji’s studies, which focus on the doings and sayings of al Qa’eda, are so at odds with what passes for common sense in this field that one sometimes wonders if he isn’t merely thumbing his nose at received wisdom. In his latest book, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity, he suggests that al Qa’eda has in some sense inherited the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. He also argues that the ideology of jihad is a “humanitarian” one, and that the militants of al Qa’eda are “the intellectual peers” of environmentalists and pacifists. What does he mean by such provocations?
/// Abuelo, Answers and Questions Maurice Kilwein Guevara
……………………………………………….1. Abuelo, why are there flies? They're reporters for the dead, mi joven bestia. What do they report? If the millionarios won or lost.
……………………………………………….2. Abuelo? What? I forgot.
……………………………………………….3. Abuelo, who puts the scorpion in my bed when I'm asleep? Why, is it there when you wake? Yes. Dead? Yes. Don't worry, the dead don't sting.
……………………………………………….4. Abuelo? What? How old am I? Almost five years old. How old are you? Old as bones. When the moon was born, I was already eight years old. . . . When I was a boy, I lived on the coast of Colombia and rode the fins of blue whales at night from Barranquilla to Nantucket Island and back, before dawn.
……………………………………………….5. Abuelo, why do I have steel hooves? To kick truth in the ass. Abuelo, why do I have shiny hooves? To dance a little cumbia. To play with mirrors. Abuelo, why do I have hooves? Because they run in the family. .
The Booker prizewinner, Barack Obama's memoir or an introduction to the meaning of life – which books stood out for you in 2008?
Steven Bailey Bognor Regis
Barack Obama's grandly titled The Audacity of Hope (Canongate) was first published in 2006. But he's now taken on a new importance. The book acts both as a personal statement – his reflections on faith, family and race – and as a considered analysis of the political system. Will his high-minded ideals be compromised by the messy practicalities of the American political process?
Sam Banik London
Judt's Reappraisals (Heinemann), about our collective cultural amnesia, is an excellent anthology of essays on writers, humanists and Marxist intellectuals. Judt is enlightening on the political milieu of European nations, America's last half-century and Israel. Steve Toltz's Booker-shortlisted debut, A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton), is an elegantly written novel about a family of émigrés in Australia.
The heavens smiled down on Earth Monday in a rare celestial trifecta of Venus, Jupiter, and the moon. The planets aligned—an event known as a conjunction—Sunday night, and were joined by a thin sliver of moon on Monday. (Related: “Sky Show December 1: Jupiter, Venus, Moon Make 'Frown'” [December 1, 2008].) The rare planetary meeting was visible from all parts of the world, even from light-polluted cities such as Hong Kong and New York.
People in Asia witnessed a smiley face (above, photographed from Manila, Philippines), while skywatchers in the United States saw a frown. The three brightest objects in the sky were so tightly gathered that one could eclipse them with a thumb, according to NASA's Web site. The next visible Venus-Jupiter conjunction will be on the evening of March 14, 2012, but the two planets will appear farther apart in the sky.
/// One may measure and measure after a listening look but never without troubling the flow. –Li Chen Man and Camel Mark Strand
On the eve of my fortieth birthday I sat on the porch having a smoke when out of the blue a man and a camel happened by. Neither uttered a sound at first, but as they drifted up the street and out of town the two of them began to sing. Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me — the words were indistinct and the tune too ornamental to recall. Into the desert they went and as they went their voices rose as one above the sifting sound of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing, its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed an ideal image for all uncommon couples. Was this the night that I had waited for so long? I wanted to believe it was, but just as they were vanishing, the man and camel ceased to sing, and galloped back to town. They stood before my porch, staring at me with beady eyes, and said: “You ruined it. You ruined it forever.” .
Israeli officials, led by defense minister and Labour Party leader Ehud Barak, have been talking since the summer about the “disproportionate” punishment they intend to inflict on Lebanon in the event of another war. News reports suggest that the Israeli Defense Forces are training for a large-scale ground campaign backed by punishing air and artillery strikes. “In the last war, we made a distinction between Hizbollah targets and Lebanese national targets,” a senior IDF general told The Jerusalem Post last month, adding that “there is no longer a reason to make this distinction.”
The head of the IDF’s Northern Command, Gadi Eisenkot, left no doubt about Israel’s aims when he told an Israeli paper that the army had devised a “Dahiyeh Doctrine” – in which Israel would level large swathes of the mostly-Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut, where Hizbollah maintains many of their offices and enjoys overwhelming support from the local population.
“We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases,” he said. “This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised.”
There are bad New Bands, there are promising ones, there are even a few great ones. And then there are those who you just know are going to dominate the scene for the next few months at least. Many of the agenda-setting new bands we've praised in this column over the last year have been American – Fleet Foxes, MGMT, Black Kids, Boy Crisis, Hockey, Amazing Baby, Chairlift – which somewhat makes a mockery of, or renders redundant, the notion of British-only music awards like the Brits and the Mercury Prize. How can geography be a criterion when you're measuring musical worth?
Violens, to be geographically precise, belong in the pantheon of Great New New York Bands. They only formed last winter, but already they're responsible for some highly accomplished and beautifully realised music, with the emphasis on the “beautiful”. We say that because we assumed from their name (pronounced vy-lenz) that they were going to be some sort of sub-Sonic Youth art-drone collective, when actually their breezy psychedelia recalls the late-60s sunshine-pop heyday of The Zombies, The Left Banke and their ilk, only with a shiny 80s production. Some of it really is rather lovely, but then if you see their name as a conflation of “violence” and “violins” it makes sense, and suits these lushly orchestrated songs about nightmares, the passage of time, speculations on spiritual messages and accounts of drug-induced hallucinations.
A car pulls up outside a Georgian house in Soho. Out steps Salman Rushdie. He's dressed entirely in black – black overcoat, black scarf, black jacket, black sweater, trousers, shoes… The only thing not completely black is his shirt and that's only because it's got a few white stripes on it. He looks – actually, he looks just like a hit-man. In his hand he carries a polythene bag full of books. When he comes upstairs, I find myself peering through the opaque plastic trying to make out the titles. One of them turns out to be the French version of his last novel, The Enchantress of Florence – now out in paperback. The book, declares Rushdie with satisfaction, has done terrifically well in France, getting 'the sort of rave reviews you find yourself making up in the bath'.
From the 
