Over a Princeton University Press, from the first chapter of Raymond Geusss's new book here. From the book description:

In politics, utopians do not have a monopoly on imagination. Even the most conservative defenses of the status quo, Raymond Geuss argues, require imaginative acts of some kind. In this collection of recent essays, including his most overtly political writing yet, Geuss explores the role of imagination in politics, particularly how imaginative constructs interact with political reality. He uses decisions about the war in Iraq to explore the peculiar ways in which politicians can be deluded and citizens can misunderstand their leaders. He also examines critically what he sees as one of the most serious delusions of western political thinking–the idea that a human society is always best conceived as a closed system obeying fixed rules. And, in essays on Don Quixote, museums, Celan's poetry, Heidegger's brother Fritz, Richard Rorty, and bourgeois philosophy, Geuss reflects on how cultural artifacts can lead us to embrace or reject conventional assumptions about the world. While paying particular attention to the relative political roles played by rule-following, utilitarian calculations of interest, and aspirations to lead a collective life of a certain kind, Geuss discusses a wide range of related issues, including the distance critics need from their political systems, the extent to which history can enlighten politics, and the possibility of utopian thinking in a world in which action retains its urgency.

From the first chapter:

Traditional philosophy was utterly fixated on the search for a single fundamental concept the analysis of which would allow one to decipher a whole area of human experience, and for a very wide range of human activities philosophers thought they had discovered an Archimedean point in the concept of a “belief” or an “opinion.” I would like to suggest that this traditional approach might in some ways stand in the way of a proper understanding of politics. In contrast to the traditional views, I would like to propose two theses. First, if one thinks it necessary to isolate a single political concept that was purportedly more central than others, one would be well advised to take as basic not “belief” or “opinion” but “action” or the “context of action.” Political judgments are not made individually one by one, but always stand as parts of larger sets of beliefs and judgments, and a political judgment is always embedded in a context of action. A political judgment is itself specifically directed at focusing, guiding and orienting future action; expressing, or even entertaining, such a judgment is performing an action. Second, “context of action” would not be a concept that could serve as an essential definition of politics in the traditional sense in which philosophers have sought such a definition. At best, “context of action” is an open concept with indeterminate contours, and boundaries that can expand and contract depending on a variety of other factors.

From The Boston Globe:

One day while he was living near Seattle, the Senegal-born linguistics professor Fallou Ngom forgot to close a window before a rainstorm passed through, and the next morning discovered the wind had blown some of his papers to the floor. On one of them, a sheet several years old, his late father had recorded a debt. Ngom’s father was considered illiterate because he couldn’t read and write in the country’s official language, French. But like many Senegalese had for centuries, he wrote daily information in his native tongue using a modified form of Arabic script known as Ajami. Ngom was struck by the irony: Here was his “illiterate” father communicating with him years after his death, in writing. Ngom realized that this was more than just a touching personal moment. It also represented an immense opportunity. Ajami script had been widely used across Africa for day-to-day writing in a dozen languages, and Ngom knew those writings had been largely overlooked in the official story of the continent – in part because so few historians could read them. How many other documents like this existed across the continent? How many had simply been missed, or ignored?

Within a year, Ngom shifted his research from French linguistics, his specialty at Western Washington University, to the handwritten script of his father. Today Ngom is director of the African Languages Program at Boston University, and is training the first generation of American scholars capable of reading Ajami. What Ngom hopes is nothing less than to lay the groundwork for a reinterpretation of much of African history, using this widespread but little understood writing system to unearth new information about the daily life of Africans, the spread of Islam, the continent’s literary traditions, the Atlantic slave trade, and who knows what else.

Could one writing system have that much influence?

More here.

Abigail Tucker in Smithsonian Magazine:

Since arriving in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park only that morning, I’d gaped at wildebeests on parade, dawdling baboons, gazelles rocketing by, oxpecker birds hitching rides atop Cape buffaloes, hippos with bubblegum-colored underbellies. The Serengeti usually dazzles first-time visitors, Packer had warned, making us giddy with an abundance of idyllic wildlife straight out of a Disney song-and-dance number.

The sublime brute only 15 feet away was my first wild Panthera leo. Male African lions can be ten feet long and weigh 400 pounds or more, and this one appeared to be pushing the limits of its species. I was glad to be inside a truck.

Packer, though, opened the door and hopped out. He snatched a stone and tossed it in the big male’s direction.

The lion raised its head. Its handsome face was raked with claw marks.

Packer threw another stone. Unimpressed, the lion briefly turned its back, showing hindquarters as smooth as cast bronze. The beast yawned and, nestling its tremendous head on its paws, shifted its gaze to us for the first time. Its eyes were yellow and cold like new doubloons.

This was one of The Killers.

More here.

Evan R. Goldstein in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

On a Monday evening in mid-October, the historian Tony Judt appeared onstage at the Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, in Greenwich Village. “I hope you don't mind if I begin by shooting the elephant in the house,” he said, speaking from an electric wheelchair, wrapped in a black blanket, with a Bi-Pap breathing device attached to his nose. “As you can see,” he continued, his voice gravelly and labored, “I'm paralyzed from the neck down, and also use this rather ridiculous-looking tube on my face to breathe.” A little more than a year ago, Judt was diagnosed with a progressive variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig's disease, a fatal condition that gradually destroys a person's ability to move, breathe, swallow, and talk.

In 2005, just four years earlier, the professor of European history at New York University had reached the pinnacle of his career with the publication of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin Press), his highly acclaimed account of Europe's rebirth after World War II. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was selected by The New York Times as one of the top 10 books of the year. Beyond academe, Judt had achieved renown as a political essayist and a formidable combatant in the quarrels between the left and right and within the left. He is perhaps best known as a harsh critic of Israel and the most prominent advocate of the creation of a single, binational state—the so-called one-state solution to the struggle between Palestinians and Israelis, a position that has earned him both plaudits and scorn.

More here.

[Click picture to enlarge.]

Sandow Birk at his website:

An ongoing project to hand-transcribe the entire Qur'an according to historic Islamic traditions
and to illuminate the text with relevant scenes from contemporary American life. Five years in the making, the project has been inspired by a decade of extended travel in Islamic regions of the world and undertaken after extensive research.

Unlike the Gospels of the New Testament – which relate narratives of Jesus’ ministry on earth – the Holy Qur’an is believed to be the verbatim words of God as communicated through the angel Gabriel to Muhammad in the 7th Century CE. Collected together and grouped generally according to length (rather than chronologically), the 114 chapters (“suras”) form a collection of sermon-like “revelations” that are the fundamental text of Islam, the fastest growing religion in America. At a time when the United States is involved in two wars against Islamic nations and declares itself to be in a cultural and philosophical struggle against Islamic extremists, American artist Sandow Birk’s latest project considers the Qur’an as it was intended – as a universal message to humankind. If the Qur’an is indeed a divine message to all peoples, he ponders, what does it mean to an individual American in the 21st Century? How does the message of the Qur’an relate to us, as Americans, in this life, in this time? What is this message that we have spent so much blood and treasure fighting against, and how can the message of the Qur’an be applied to contemporary American life? In short, what might the Qur’an mean to contemporary Americans?

From that starting point, Sandow Birk has spent the past five years creating a personal Qur’an. Following the traditions of ancient Arabic and Islamic manuscripts, the artist has been hand-transcribing the entire English-translated text of the Qur’an as was done in centuries past – following traditional guidelines as to the colors of inks, the formatting of the pages, the size of margins and the illuminations of page headings and medallions marking verses and passages.

More here. [Thanks to Jeff Strabone.]

From Scientific American:

Genetic mutations that enhance disease resistance or boost fitness in a particular climate have been positively selected over the course of human evolution. But current statistical methods to find these beneficial mutations, or variants, have only been able to home in on areas spanning several genes, which may cover a variety of other functions, as well. And within these broad swaths of the human genome, there are a number of nonselected, or neutral, variants that also get preferentially inherited because they are on the same chromosome as the selected variant. “It's basically that a whole haystack of [mutations] gets pulled up when selection occurs and then you're trying to find which one was the driver—the needle,” says Pardis Sabeti, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

To narrow down the culprits for positive selection, Sabeti and her team of researchers developed an approach that combines statistical methods that differ in their specificity for selected variants into one powerful tool. Using the composite tool, the group analyzed mutations in regions from different chromosomes spanning hundreds of kilobases, or hundreds of thousands of nucleotides. The mutations occurred both inside of genes or in the parts of the genome that do not encode genes. Although the team optimized their method for selection that has taken place in the past 30,000 years, Sabeti says that with some tweaking, the approach could stretch back to the point when human populations began migrating out of Africa and diverging from each other 50,000 to 70,000 years ago. The first study using the team's composite method was published January 7 in Science. Using this technique, the scientists could predict an area of the genome as narrow as a single gene, rather than several, that had likely been positively selected. For example, they found a single gene involved in eye color or skin pigmentation that was likely to be selected for from a region containing five genes.

More here.

By Marina Tsvetaeva:

Whence cometh such tender rapture?
Those curls–they are not the first ones
I've smoothened, and I've already
Known lips–that were darker than yours.

The stars have risen and faded,
–Whence cometh such tender rapture?–
And eyes have risen and faded
In face of these eyes of mine

I'd never yet hearkened unto
Such songs in the depths of darkness,
–Whence cometh such tender rapture?–
My head on the bard's own breast

Whence cometh such tender rapture?
And what's to be done with it, artful
Young vagabound, passing minstrel
With lashes–too long to say.

Richard Van Noorden in Nature:

Earth-like worlds elsewhere

As planet-hunters eagerly await the discovery of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone around a Sun-like star, they may have to make do this year with an easier target: a potentially hospitable planet around a red dwarf star. NASA's Kepler telescope has already discovered previously unknown planets (see page 15).

Hope for HIV prevention

Early this year, the first clinical trial to use a gel incorporating an antiretroviral drug is expected to release its initial results; several large trials of other microbicides have failed to show benefit in blocking HIV. Early results are also due from long-anticipated trials that look at 'pre-exposure prophylaxis', or administering anti-HIV drugs before risky sex.

A perfect symmetry

Evidence for supersymmetry — the theory that every known fundamental particle has an undiscovered, superheavy partner — may be the most intriguing discovery to come from Europe's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. The find would be even more bizarre than the anticipated Higgs boson, the particle thought to imbue matter with mass.

Quantum effects go large

Solid objects in physics laboratories could be seen to enter a superposition of states — the real-world version of Schrödinger's mythical cat that is dead and alive at the same time. The effect, predicted by quantum mechanics, has previously been seen in objects no bigger than ions, but could push into the macroscopic realm this year.

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

We are not yet far into 2010, but studies show that fewer than half of those who make New Year’s resolutions manage to keep them for as long as one month. What does this tell us about human nature, and our ability to live either prudently or ethically?

Part of the problem, of course, is that we make resolutions to do only things that we are not otherwise likely to do. Only an anorexic would resolve to eat ice cream at least once a week, and only a workaholic would resolve to spend more time in front of the television. So we use the occasion of the New Year to try to change behavior that may be the most difficult to change. That makes failure a distinct possibility.

Nevertheless, presumably we make resolutions because we have decided that it would be best to do whatever it is that we are resolving to do. But if we have already made that decision, why don’t we just do it? From Socrates onwards, that question has puzzled philosophers. In the Protagoras, one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates says that no one chooses what they know to be bad. Hence choosing what is bad is a kind of error: people will do it only if they think that it is good. If we can teach people what is best, Socrates and Plato seem to have thought, they will do it. But that is a hard doctrine to swallow – much harder than eating the extra slice of cake that you know is not good for you.

Aristotle took a different view, one that fits better with our everyday experience of failing to do what we know to be best. Our reason may tell us what is best to do, he thought, but in a particular moment our reason may be overwhelmed by emotion or desire. Thus, the problem is not lack of knowledge, but the failure of our reason to master other, non-rational aspects of our nature.

That view is supported by recent scientific work showing that much of our behavior is based on very rapid, instinctive, emotionally based responses.

Barry Schwabsky on the death and afterlife of the Polaroid in The Nation:

“Why can't I see them now?” is the daughter's question that's said to have inspired Edwin Land to devise the instant camera eventually produced by his Polaroid Corporation. The camera was announced in 1947 and hit the market in 1948. Sixty years later the company stopped production of its film-based cameras and then of its self-developing film. The last Polaroid film expired on October 9. Today someone's grandmother might be wondering, “Why can't I see them anymore?”

The answer, of course, is that digital photography killed the Polaroid, as it is killing much chemically based photography. The immediate gratification, the narcissistic fix offered by the picture that rolls out of the camera and develops right before your eyes, has been granted in a new way by the digital camera. You don't even need to print out the image–just immediately check it out onscreen. Most of these pictures will never be printed–will never really, in any meaningful way, exist as photographs. They will be gazed at and giggled over for a few moments, and then they will quietly subsist as code until the memory where they sleep is lost or fails. Quite simply, digital technology redefined Polaroid's “now,” turning it into something even more like “now” than Polaroid had been able to offer. Or maybe it changed the meaning of “now,” or replaced it with something more like “already.”

Polaroid's “now” having been driven into the past, it has become ripe for nostalgia. Found Magazine, launched in 2001, was well ahead of the Polaroid nostalgia wave and spun off a whole book of Found Polaroids in 2006, when the end of the road was already in sight. But for its author, Jason Bitner, the medium had always been “instant nostalgia–framed and faded, a picture that already looked decades old.”

It's true. The romance of Polaroid is about more than a photographic process becoming obsolete. It's also evoked by something embedded in the very medium–a material quality that's distinct from other types of photographs. I was reminded of this by a couple of exhibitions recently mounted in London to commemorate the passing of the Polaroid: “Shake It: An Instant History of the Polaroid” at the Pump House Gallery, a public space supported by the Borough of Wandsworth; and “Polaroid: Exp.09.10.09,” on view through January 16 at Atlas Gallery, a specialist photography dealer.

There's some significance in the surprisingly large number of artists whose work appeared in these quite different shows: Nobuyoshi Araki, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lucas Samaras and Andy Warhol.

166 scientists, writers, artists, inventors, entrepreneurs and others, including Stewart Brand, John Brockman, Richard Dawkins, Eric Fischl & April Gornik, W. Danny Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Jonas Mekas, Dave Morin, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Clay Shirky, and Nassim Taleb answer the question “How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think?”, over at Edge. Taleb:

[C]onsider the explosive situation: more information (particularly thanks to the Internet) causes more confidence and illusions of knowledge while degrading predictability.

Look at this current economic crisis that started in 2008: there are about a million persons on the planet who identify themselves in the field of economics. Yet just a handful realized the possibility and depth of what could have taken place and protected themselves from the consequences. At no time in the history of mankind have we lived under so much ignorance (easily measured in terms of forecast errors) coupled with so much intellectual hubris. At no point have we had central bankers missing elementary risk metrics, like debt levels, that even the Babylonians understood well.

I recently talked to a scholar of rare wisdom and erudition, Jon Elster, who upon exploring themes from social science, integrates insights from all authors in the corpus of the past 2500 years, from Cicero and Seneca, to Montaigne and Proust. He showed me how Seneca had a very sophisticated understanding of loss aversion. I felt guilty for the time I spent on the Internet. Upon getting home I found in my mail a volume of posthumous essays by bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet called Huetiana, put together by his admirers c. 1722. It is so saddening to realize that, being born close to four centuries after Huet, and having done most of my reading with material written after his death, I am not much more advanced in wisdom than he was — moderns at the upper end are no wiser than their equivalent among the ancients; if anything, much less refined.

So I am now on an Internet diet, in order to understand the world a bit better — and make another bet on horrendous mistakes by economic policy makers.

Over at Prospect, Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky debate the question. Morozov:

One possible reading of the current situation on the ground in Tehran is that, despite all the political mobilisation facilitated by social media, the Iranian government has not only survived, but has, in fact, become even more authoritarian. The changes currently taking place in Iran are far from positive: a catastrophic brain drain triggered by the recent political repressions, a series of violent crackdowns on politically active university students who have chosen to remain in the country, the persecution of critical bloggers, journalists and editors, the appointment of more conservative ministers to the government, and mounting pressure on dissident politicians. From this perspective, the last six months could be taken to reveal the impotence of decentralised movements in the face of a ruthless authoritarian state—even when those movements are armed with modern protest tools.

Focusing on the frequency and the intensity of protests—as Shirky does in his response to my essay—may infuse us with unjustified optimism.

Shirky:

The basic hypothesis is an updated version of that outlined by Jürgen Habermas in his 1962 publication, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. A group of people, so Habermas’s theory goes, who take on the tools of open expression becomes a public, and the presence of a synchronised public increasingly constrains undemocratic rulers while expanding the rights of that public (the monarchies of Europe, in Habermas’s telling, become authoritarian governments within the contemporary scenario). Put another way, even taking into account the increased availability of surveillance, the net value of social media has shifted the balance of power in the direction of Iran’s citizens.

As Evgeny notes, however, that hypothesis might be wrong. Or, if it is right, the ways in which it is right might be minor, or rare, or take decades to unfold.

Yet while the Ahmadinejad regime is clearly willing to use event-based internet filtering, whereby mobile network coverage or internet access is temporarily blocked—a strategy we might call a “temporary Burma”—I do not believe that Iran can become a “permanent Burma.” The kind of information shutdown required to keep all forms of public assembly from boiling over will be beyond the authorities in Iran.

Adam Shatz reviews Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence in the LRB:

The Museum of Innocence is, apart from anything else, a wry, perceptive novel of manners about the Turkish bourgeoisie. Pamuk grew up among these people in Nisantasi, the neighbourhood where much of the action takes place, and he describes its inhabitants with anthropological precision, as they shop for handbags, go on trips to Paris and nose around each other’s business. They fancy themselves free and modern, but they mostly adhere to the patriarchal codes that govern their incestuous world, if only for fear of exposure and disgrace, lacking – as Pamuk has written of his own family – ‘the courage to make the final break’. Men, in this world, are the romantics; the women know better. As Kemal’s mother warns him, ‘In a country where men and women can’t be together socially, where they can’t see each other or have a conversation, there’s no such thing as love … Don’t deceive yourself.’

But Pamuk is as much a romantic as an ironist, and curiously indulgent of Kemal, whose ruminations on love, desire and loss run on for pages. Like most of Pamuk’s heroes, he’s so neurotically aware of the life he isn’t leading that he has scarcely any life at all, taking refuge in memories of an idyllic past that will remain forever out of reach. Füsun, another of Pamuk’s beautiful, fickle, inscrutable heroines, makes only the faintest impression: she is not so much a woman as an object of beguilement, a promesse de bonheur, a fantasy that Pamuk seems to share with Kemal. Kemal’s dreamy soft-core flashbacks – ‘As our kisses grew ever longer, a honeyed pool of warm saliva gathered in the great cave that was our mouths combined, sometimes leaking a little down our chins, while before our eyes the sort of dreamscape that is the preserve of childish hope began to take form’ – are, of course, a symptom of his self-absorption, his childish attachment to the museum of innocence that nostalgia fashions from the past. Yet Pamuk seems to embrace this nostalgia: he turns up late in the novel to offer his own breathless memories of dancing with Füsun at Kemal’s disastrous engagement party to Sibel. (Pamuk appears in almost all his novels, sometimes as the narrator, sometimes under cheeky pseudonyms such as ‘Orphan Panic’, and occasionally as the anonymous writer of Pamukian novels.) And Füsun bears a resemblance to other significant women in Pamuk, such as the girl he describes in the memoir Istanbul, who sat for him when he was an aspiring painter (‘my sad and beautiful model’, ‘my almond-scented love’); like Füsun, she is a stand-in, an aide-mémoire for the loss of youth, even for Istanbul itself, a city where, in Pamuk’s depiction, happiness is always a thing of the past.

The memoir is a book about the city and a book about Pamuk: they share a fate, and that is to be melancholy.

Joe Kloc in Seed Magazine:

When physicist John Smith spent the night in his garden with the score to Götterdämmerung, the final opera in Richard Wagner’s four-part, 15-hour epic, Der Ring des Nibelungen, he wasn’t interested in its account of the apocalyptic struggle of Norse gods for control of the world. Smith was concerned with a struggle of a different sort—one between the opera’s words and music that might elucidate the controversial German composer’s peculiar vision for the future of art.

On Smith’s mind was an age-old difficulty all soprano singers face: They mispronounce lyrics when singing powerfully in the top half of their range. This “soprano problem” was formally recognized at least as far back as 1843, when French composer Hector Berlioz wrote in his Treatise on Instrumentation that “[sopranos] should not be required to sing many words on high phrases, since this makes the pronunciation of syllables very difficult if not impossible.” It does not appear, however, that Berlioz—or anyone else—ever understood why this problem occurred.

In 2004, Smith and his colleagues Joe Wolfe and Elodie Joliveau at the University of New South Wales published a study in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that revealed the physiological cause of the soprano problem for the first time. They sent an acoustic signal through the vocal tracts of nine sopranos and used a microphone to measure how the signal changed when the sopranos sang vowel sounds at various pitches. They found that when a soprano sings at high pitches, she adjusts her vocal tract to make her voice resonate. In effect, she “tunes” the resonance frequency of her vocal tract to match the frequency of the pitch at which she is singing. This vocal-tract tuning, which gives a soprano’s voice enough power to fill an opera house, is what makes certain words at high pitches difficult for the audience to understand. (It is joked by singers that Wagner’s character of Siegfried in Der Ring des Nibelungen ought to have been called Sahgfried, as his name is sometimes pronounced that way by sopranos looking to get the most volume out of their voices.) Jane Eaglen, a critically acclaimed soprano who has performed Wagner’s works in opera houses worldwide, explains that sopranos must try to find a balance between power and clarity. “It’s really about how you modify the vowels at the top of the voice so that the words are still understandable but so that you are also making the best sound that you can make,” she says.

David Brooks, yes that David Brooks, on Avatar (Warning: spoliers in article):

Every age produces its own sort of fables, and our age seems to have produced The White Messiah fable.

This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization.

Avid moviegoers will remember “A Man Called Horse,” which began to establish the pattern, and “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” More people will have seen “Dances With Wolves” or “The Last Samurai.”

Kids have been given their own pure versions of the fable, like “Pocahontas” and “FernGully.”

[H/t: Ajay Chaudhary]

Read more »

From The Telegraph:

White is especially good on the city which has shaped him. He knows intimately its brand of metro-centric savviness, of “New Yorkiness”, a contagious and debilitating knowingness which he characterises as “the recognition of a thousand names and faces”. That not all of White’s names mean an awful lot to the world at large is summed up in his story of an American socialite, Marguerite Littman, who stares at a cadaverous girl beside the Cipriani pool (a favourite White location), then turns to Tennessee Williams: “Look, anorexia nervosa!” Williams replies: “Oh, Marguerite you know everyone.”

The qualities of White’s observation, frankness and subject matter are on best display in his sketch of the novelist Harold Brodkey. “Everyone in New York was curious about him, but few people outside the city had ever heard of him.” Perhaps only in New York could someone be so revered yet have published so little – save for furtive glimpses in The New Yorker of his masterpiece-in-progress, which moved the critic Harold Bloom to describe his voice as “unparalleled in American prose fiction since the death of William Faulkner”. When at last The Runaway Soul was published in 1991 for an advance in excess of $1 million, it promptly went belly up. Brodkey died soon after of Aids, as did so many of White’s friends. Now, “he’s practically been forgotten”.

In New York, White reminds us, “nothing lasts” – not even friendship.

More here.

From The New York Times:

When exactly was it that “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir about her divorce and subsequent year of travel in Italy, India and Indonesia, crossed from mere best seller — published in more than 30 languages, feted by Oprah — to cultural phenomenon? The film adaptation is due out later this year, with Gilbert played by (but of course) Julia Roberts; some of the people Gilbert wrote about, including her ex-husband, are now working on books of their own; and Gilbert’s second appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” featured such admiring readers as a woman who had actually retraced much of Gilbert’s around-the-world journey. Perhaps most impressive of all, in a sign of what a widely understood reference point the book has become, it inspired a headline in The Onion: “Copy of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ Left on ­Elliptical.” So self-aware, accommodating and generally good-natured a writer is Gilbert that in “Committed” she gives us what we want by addressing the “Eat, Pray, Love” business right away — as in, before the new book even officially begins, in a prefatory note to the reader. No, she tells us, she had no idea how big “Eat, Pray, Love” would be (a claim believable in part because of that book’s candor about topics like constipation, masturbation and two-way conversations with God). Yes, after the success of “Eat, Pray, Love,” she was freaked out and self-conscious and wondered if she was finished as a writer, in spite of the fact that she’d written three earlier books, all well received and one nominated for a National Book Award. And no, she doesn’t think she can replicate the popularity of “Eat, Pray, Love,” but here’s the book she needed to write this time around.

Once that’s out of the way, we pick up pretty much where “Eat, Pray, Love” left off, with Gilbert in the arms of the boyfriend she pseudonymously calls Felipe — a debonair Brazilian gemstone importer who had become an Australian citizen and met Gilbert while he was living in Bali. He is older, 55 to her 37 when “Committed” starts in the spring of 2006. They’ve established a happy rhythm in which they mostly share a rented house in suburban Philadelphia, but in order to comply with visa restrictions Felipe leaves the country for several weeks every three months; for two inveterate travelers and independent personalities, this routine is no big deal. Felipe also has been through a divorce, he has adult children and he’s as determined as Gilbert not to ruin the good thing they have by marrying.

More here.

Margaret Atwood in The Guardian:

How to justify the ways of men to birds? How to account for their attraction for us? (For, despite Hitchcock's frightening hunt-and-peck film, The Birds, it is mostly an attraction.) Why is Chekhov's play called “The Seagull” instead of “The Sea Slug”? Why is Yeats so keen on swans and hawks, instead of an interesting centipede or snail, or even an attractive moth? Why is it a dead albatross that is hung around the Ancient Mariner's neck as a symbol that he's been a very bad mariner, instead of, for instance, a dead clam? Why do we so immediately identify with such feathered symbols? These are some of the questions that trouble my waking hours.

For as long as we human beings can remember, we've been looking up. Over our heads went the birds – free as we were not, singing as we tried to. We gave their wings to our deities, from Inanna to winged Hermes to the dove-shaped Holy Spirit of Christianity, and their songs to our angels. We believed the birds knew things we didn't, and this made sense to us, because only they had access to the panoramic picture – the ground we walked on, but seen widely because seen from above, a vantage point we came to call “the bird's eye view”. The Norse god Odin had two ravens called Thought and Memory, who flew around the earth during the day and came back at evening to whisper into his ears everything they'd seen and heard; which was why – in the mode of governments with advanced snooping systems, or even of Google Earth – he was so very all-knowing.

More here.

David Holloway reviews a biography of Wernher von Braun by Wayne Biddle, in the New York Time Book Review:

A NASA Web site describes him as “without doubt, the greatest rocket scientist in history.”

Born in 1912, von Braun came from a conservative Junker family. As a student in Berlin, he fell in with a rather louche group of rocket enthusiasts. In the 1930s, patronage came from the army, which set up a special rocket base on the Baltic Sea, at Peenemünde, where von Braun worked from 1937 until 1945. It was there that he helped to build the A-4 (V-2) missile. Six thousand of these missiles were produced, and about 3,000 were launched against London and Antwerp in the last year of World War II.

After the war, von Braun claimed that his main interest had been in space flight all along. His work for the German Army had been an unfortunate necessity because that was where resources could be obtained, and, besides, it was dangerous to resist the Nazi state.

Biddle will have none of this. In his view, von Braun was very far from being an innocent visionary who took Nazi money in order to pursue his dream.

More here.