David Van Biema in Time:

The fatwa — now more or less lifted — did not sour Rushdie from his conviction that religion is necessary to writers, if only because it provides the only available language on certain topics. “I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not — there are no words to express some things except religious words,” he said. “For instance, ‘soul.” I don’t believe in an afterlife or heaven or hell, yet there isn’t a secular word for that feeling that we are not only flesh and blood. Whether you’re religious or not you may find yourself obliged to use language shaped by religion.”

Under the prompting of Gauri Viswanathan, a Columbia professor of English and Comparative literature, Rushdie expressed a deep appreciation for the outward expressions of faith. “I grew up looking out my window at Kings College chapel [the iconic building at Cambridge University, which Rushdie attended],” he says. “And its hard not to believe in the capacity of religion to create beauty” with that sight in his memory. He then expressed wonder that, as a non-Christian secularist, he was invited in 1993 to preach a sermon in that same chapel and did. “There are moments in your life that surprise you,” he said.

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell’s elegant and wildly popular theories about modern life have turned his name into an adjective—Gladwellian! But in his new book, he seeks to undercut the cult of success, including his own, by explaining how little control we have over it.

Jason Zengerle in New York Magazine:

Outliers is at once Gladwell’s least and most ambitious book. Unlike The Tipping Point and Blink, which took their counterintuitiveness to extremes, the conventional wisdom Gladwell seeks to demolish in Outliers isn’t even really CW anymore. Is there anyone who still believes that “success is exclusively a matter of individual merit,” which is how Gladwell describes his straw man? And yet, as Gladwell examines all the things other than individual merit—the “hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies”—that produce hockey stars and software billionaires and math geniuses, he builds a brief for a massive reorganization of social structures and institutions that will give people who don’t have those advantages and opportunities and legacies an equal shot at success.

More here.

Rebecca Sato in The Daily Galaxy:

Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey has famously stated, “The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today …whether they realize it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries.”

Perhaps de Gray is way too optimistic, but plenty of others have joined the search for a virtual fountain of youth. In fact, a growing number of scientists, doctors, geneticists and nanotech experts—many with impeccable academic credentials—are insisting that there is no hard reason why ageing can’t be dramatically slowed or prevented altogether. Not only is it theoretically possible, they argue, but a scientifically achievable goal that can and should be reached in time to benefit those alive today.

“I am working on immortality,” says Michael Rose, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, who has achieved breakthrough results extending the lives of fruit flies. “Twenty years ago the idea of postponing aging, let alone reversing it, was weird and off-the-wall. Today there are good reasons for thinking it is fundamentally possible.”

More here.

Sartre’s Sink: An Interview with Mark Crick from Granta magazine on Vimeo.

DIY for the pretentious sort of jackasses who follow 3QD 🙂
From Granta.

IF THERE’S A single word that has been used more than any other to describe last week’s election, it is “historic.” In a different year, this might be dismissed as the hyperbole that comes with the season, but this time the word is undeniably apt. The sense of history has been palpable. It was felt in the spontaneous street celebrations, in the way words faltered, in the keen conviction that a sprawling, modern nation had just achieved a measure of old-fashioned redemption. But what place will the elevation of the senator from Illinois really be given in history? In 50 years, will the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, be judged a pivot in the grand national narrative, or just a symbolic footnote?

Ideas put this question to five American historians. Their task was an act of imagination: to project themselves ahead to the middle of the century and gaze back, following the long threads of American politics and society; to report how the emotionally charged event might appear from a cool distance.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

It was while the Burmese people came together when cyclone Nargis struck, driving aid to victims and pulling fallen trees from the capital’s roads in the absence of any governmental help, that Suu Kyi’s noticeboard leapt into life. One of those prompted to talk out by the bizarre martyrdom message was Tun Myint Aung, a student leader from 1988. He concluded: “No one can deny that we are on the side of truth and the people. But what we also have to consider seriously is whether our sacrifices alone will actually bring victory.” Being a martyr was simply not good enough.

It was a point underscored by Burma’s longest-serving political prisoner, Win Tin, a 79-year-old former journalist and advisor to Suu Kyi, who was released by the junta on September 23 this year. Reappointed secretary to the NLD’s central executive committee, he immediately entered the fray. The fight for democracy “hadn’t ended yet”, he announced. However, “the NLD alone can’t work it out”. Instead of waiting the junta out, and turning its back, the party and its leader would have to begin engaging with its enemies as well as its friends. With any one, in fact, with whom it could form a dialogue. But when it comes to leaders, some in the party are asking whether it is it time to move on from Aung San Suu Kyi.

more from The Guardian here.

From The Guardian:

Leisurely unpacking books after moving house is one of my most indulgent, and dusty, pleasures. As the books have a tendency to distract me from finishing the job, it can take any amount of time to complete the task. At the bottom of a box that contained a novel, never finished, with a train ticket bookmark telling its own story and a bunch of foxed paperbacks, I found something I’d assumed I’d lost long ago: a battered copy of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I sat down on the floor and began to read, transported back to 1930s London and 1990s Congleton.

I must have read Orwell’s third novel at least a dozen times between 1990 and 1992, and it changed me. Or more specifically, the central character, Gordon Comstock, changed me. Despite Comstock being arrogant, self-delusional, bitter and cynical, there was something about him that made sense – even when Orwell’s novel does not. Comstock is a prematurely aged twenty-something, who has quit his job in advertising to work part time in a bookstore while he writes his magnum opus, London’s Pleasures. There he rails against the Money God, shaking his fist at the capitalist west. Despite family, friends and a woman who loves him, he seems determined to throw his life away in an egotistical show of his own rejection of middle-class values.

More here.

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

In late September, the American Psychological Association reversed a longstanding policy by voting to ban its members from participating in interrogations at United States detention centers, including Guantanamo Bay. Just a year earlier, the association had declined to take this action, but did pass a resolution listing a number of methods of interrogation -– sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, exploitation of phobias, loud music, harsh lights and mock executions were examples –- with which psychologists should not be involved.

What the association did this September brought it into line with the positions of the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, which declared in a May 2006 statement that “No psychiatrist should participate directly in the interrogation of person held by military or civilian investigative or law enforcement authorities.”

Why did psychology, generally considered to be one of the most liberal of disciplines, lag behind its sister professions?

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Over the summer, Sonja Prohaska decided to try an experiment. She would spend a day without ever saying the word “gene.” Dr. Prohaska is a bioinformatician at the University of Leipzig in Germany. In other words, she spends most of her time gathering, organizing and analyzing information about genes. “It was like having someone tie your hand behind your back,” she said. But Dr. Prohaska decided this awkward experiment was worth the trouble, because new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein. “It cannot work that way,” Dr. Prohaska said. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes.

It turns out, for example, that several different proteins may be produced from a single stretch of DNA. Most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but another chemical known as RNA. The familiar double helix of DNA no longer has a monopoly on heredity. Other molecules clinging to DNA can produce striking differences between two organisms with the same genes. And those molecules can be inherited along with DNA.

The gene, in other words, is in an identity crisis.

More here.

Spencer Tunick. Melbourne 5 (Women Over 35). 2001

Installation.

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to Ruchira Paul.

It seems that the whole Shah family is furiously backpedaling and denying links to the VHP:

“We are in no way involved with the VHP in India or the Gujarat Government here,” said Anand Shah, who runs Indicorps in Ahmedabad, an NGO Sonal Shah co-founded that provides fellowships to overseas Indian-origin young professionals to do internships in India in social work.

Notice the misleading “in India” which makes the sentence technically true, but ignores the fact that Sonal Shah was the National Coordinator of the VHP in America (the VHPA), and the whole family is deeply connected to right wing Hindu organizations responsible for the murder of thousands of minority citizens in India.

From Indian Express:

Anand Shah, the brother of economist Sonal Shah who has been named by US President-elect Barack Obama as member of his advisory board, said today that his family and their NGO had nothing to do with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or the Gujarat government.

As a “coordinator” of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad America (VHPA), Sonal Shah helped raise funds for victims of the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat. Her brother, who said that she couldn’t comment given her present responsibilities, criticised the 2002 riots.

More here.  And from the Hindustan Times:

Obama team member has Sangh links

US President-elect Barack Obama may have cultivated a left-of-center image for himself, but Sonal Shah, the Indian-American advisor in his transition team, has well established rightwing leanings.

The 40-year-old economist has been associated with the overseas activities of the Sangh Parivar. She was a national coordinator of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America campaign to raise funds for Gujarat earthquake victims in 2001.

Her father Ramesh Shah, a vice-president of the Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party (OFBJP), had campaigned for LK Advani in Gandhinagar during the 2004 Lok Sabha elections. He had also briefly traveled with Advani during his Bharat Udaya Yatra,  countrywide election tour.

More here.  And this from the Times of India:

Will Obama’s top aide give Modi visa power?

Will economist Sonal Shah, one of US president-elect Barack Obama’s top aides, open the doors of America for Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi who has been barred from entering the US by the Bush Administration?

Shah, 40, an economist who co-founded Indicorps, comes from a family believed to be close to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and particularly to Modi, having known him since his days as a young pracharak. The Houston-based Shahs developed strong links to the Sangh Parivar around the same time Modi decided to dedicate his life to the Sangh.

Modi used to visit the Shah family, which migrated to the US in 1970, whenever he was in the US before he was sworn in as Gujarat’s CM, a source said. Sonal, inducted as an advisory board member by the US president-elect to assist him in smooth transition of power, could play a vital role in reversing the Bush Administration’s decision not to grant Modi a visa for a visit in effect since March 2005.

It’s vital for Modi that Sonal eventually gets an important profile in the Obama Administration because an insider could influence or change policy decisions of the previous dispensation — notwithstanding Obama’s known views on religious freedom.

There are other examples indicating close ties between the Shahs and Modi.

More here.  And this is from the Indian Daily News & Analysis:

Govt hesitant to discuss Shah’s alleged Sangh links

NEW DELHI: No one in the government wants to comment on the startling revelation that President elect Barak Obama’s  transition adviser, Sonal Shah is a closely linked to the Sangh Parivar overseas’s chapter. “We have no idea, and we don’t react to press reports, anyway she is a US citizen and her appointment is an internal issue of a foreign country, ” is the standard response  from foreign service officials. But privately those close to the Congress and opposed to the BJP are quite rattled.

But most believe that Obama probably has little idea of what these links mean in the Indian context. “ It is extremely silly for the Obama camp not to have done a through background check of people in the transition team,” says former ambassasdor Arundhuti Ghosh, though he unsure about the truths of these reports. Analyst K Subrahmanyam, is unperturbed by the reports of Shah’s VHP links. He was irritated at the tendency to “titillate and exaggerate.” “Let us not jump to hasty conclusions,” he said.

Al Gore in the New York Times:

The electrifying redemption of America’s revolutionary declaration that all human beings are born equal sets the stage for the renewal of United States leadership in a world that desperately needs to protect its primary endowment: the integrity and livability of the planet.

The world authority on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, now says that the evidence is “unequivocal.” To those who are still tempted to dismiss the increasingly urgent alarms from scientists around the world, ignore the melting of the north polar ice cap and all of the other apocalyptic warnings from the planet itself, and who roll their eyes at the very mention of this existential threat to the future of the human species, please wake up. Our children and grandchildren need you to hear and recognize the truth of our situation, before it is too late.

More here.

John Swaine in The Telegraph:

• He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics

• He was known as “O’Bomber” at high school for his skill at basketball

• His name means “one who is blessed” in Swahili

• His favourite meal is wife Michelle’s shrimp linguini

• He won a Grammy in 2006 for the audio version of his memoir, Dreams From My Father

• He is left-handed – the sixth post-war president to be left-handed

• He has read every Harry Potter book

• He owns a set of red boxing gloves autographed by Muhammad Ali

• He worked in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop as a teenager and now can’t stand ice cream

• His favourite snacks are chocolate-peanut protein bars

• He ate dog meat, snake meat, and roasted grasshopper while living in Indonesia

• He can speak Spanish

• While on the campaign trail he refused to watch CNN and had sports channels on instead

• His favourite drink is black forest berry iced tea

• He promised Michelle he would quit smoking before running for president – he didn’t

• He kept a pet ape called Tata while in Indonesia

• He can bench press an impressive 200lbs

More here.

Down on Hester Street, a dingy thoroughfare dominated by 19th-century tenement housing and Chinese storefronts, is the shop of the veggie butcher. When I was first told of the place, about six years ago, I pictured a dark, cold room with raw hunks of tofu hanging from steel hooks in the ceiling and, behind a seitan-stained counter, a man with a giant belly hacking off the choicest pieces according to customers’ taste.

The actual May Wah Vegetarian Food store is a tidy fluorescent place with walls covered in wood paneling and freezers filled with faux meats of every flavor and design. Though most of May Wah’s business is wholesale, selling to suppliers and restaurants worldwide (President Lee Mee Ng estimates that 50 percent of New York’s vegetarian restaurants buy their faux meat from May Wah), individuals can shop directly from the freezers on Hester Street, which hold a mind-boggling array of imitation animal parts. You can get ready-to-eat dishes like Black Pepper Steak, Chicken Nuggets, and the ever-popular Citrus Spare Ribs.

more from Table Matters here.

A year and a half ago, around the time thoughtful conservatives started to realize that George W. Bush might not in fact be a combination of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote a cover story pinpointing the source of the president’s failings: He had a competence problem. Going forward, Lowry suggested, the party might want a new leader a bit less, well, meatheaded than the incumbent. Republicans would seek out someone who “doesn’t run the government like George W. Bush,” he predicted–someone “detail-oriented” and “proven (in jobs more demanding than part owner of a baseball team or governor in a state where the office is weak).”

Yet the Republican who has emerged from the wreckage of the 2008 elections having captured the loyalty of the party faithful–Sarah Palin–does not quite fit this description. The base does not appear concerned. “At a recent meeting of conservative activists,” writes an approving Midge Decter, “the very mention of her name set the whole room cheering and the women present all but dancing on the tables.”

more from TNR here.

Jim Culleny in NoUtopia:

When I was 18 and in the Navy I sometimes spent 72 hour liberties at home in NJ. I traveled from Norfolk, VA, up and down the Delmarva Peninsula, by means of my thumb. The trip involved a ferry ride across the mouth of Chesapeake Bay from Little Creek to Kiptopeke. This was before the building of the spectacular bridge-tunnel there.

Being a studied lover of ignorance (a real dunce) who managed to make it through high school without ever reading a book cover to cover, I had little sense of, or interest in, what went on in the world beyond local happenings. So, during my first Virginia ferry ride (at about the time Barack Obama was born), I noticed a water fountain marked “colored” and the thought crossed my mind, why would they have a fountain with colored water?

No, really.

I remained stupid for at least the next few minutes until I had to use the john and noticed the bathrooms marked “colored” and “white”. Then, bubbling up through the sludge I had been pouring into my brain came the malevolent belch of the concept “segregation”. It’s not that the idea had not managed to make it’s way in there, it’s just that I was too comfortable and disinterested to notice.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Eight years ago, when Erik Ramsey was 16, a car accident triggered a brain stem stroke that left him paralyzed. Though fully conscious, Ramsey was completely paralyzed, essentially “locked in,” unable to move or talk. He could communicate only by moving his eyes up or down, thereby answering questions with a yes or a no. Ramsey’s doctors recommended sending him to a nursing facility. Instead his parents brought him home. In 2004 they met neurologist Philip R. Kennedy, chief scientist at Neural Signals in Duluth, Ga. He offered Ramsey the chance to take part in an unusual experiment. Surgeons would implant a high-tech device called a neural prosthesis into Ramsey’s brain, enabling him to communicate his thoughts to a computer that would translate them into spoken words.

Today Ramsey sports a small metal electrode in his brain. Its thin wires penetrate a fraction of an inch into his motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement, including the motion of his vocal muscles. When Ramsey thinks of saying a sound, the implant captures the electrical firing of nearby neurons and transmits their impulses to a computer, which decodes them and produces the sounds. So far Ramsey can only say a few simple vowels, but Kennedy believes that he will recover his full range of speech by 2010.

Ramsey’s neural prosthesis ranks among the most sophisticated implanted devices that translate thoughts into actions. Such systems listen to the brain’s instructions for movement—even when actual movement is no longer possible—and decode the signals for use in operating a computer or moving a robot.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Samuel de Champlain is little known to most Americans, except as the namesake of a frigid lake. Generally speaking, we’re biased against the French and bored by Canada. In school books, France’s role in the making of our nation doesn’t extend much beyond Lafayette, the French-and-Indian War and the Louisiana Purchase. So it may surprise American readers that Champlain not only founded Quebec City but reached Plymouth Harbor 15 years before the Pilgrims. He explored Cape Cod and Maine and probed upstate New York as far inland as Syracuse. Millions of Americans descend from early settlers who followed Champlain to New France, a domain that in his day extended from Canada to Philadelphia.

Champlain also stands out for the stunning breadth and drama of his career. This is a man who never learned to swim, yet shot American rapids in bark canoes and crossed the Atlantic 27 times without losing a ship. He sought peace with Indians but marched on the Mohawk, defeating them in battle while plucking an arrow from his neck. He was also a talented spy, mapmaker, artist, naturalist and writer — as well as a gourmand who founded the first gastronomic society in America, the Ordre de Bon Temps. In short, it’s hard to imagine a more appealing biographical subject than this French action-figure with high ideals and a taste for moose meat and beaver tail.

More here.

Howard Wainer in American Scientist:

Many answers have been proposed to the riddle that the Mad Hatter posed to Alice at their famous tea party (for example, because Poe wrote on both). Let me argue for yet another one: the power of convention.

As I compose this essay, the writing desk I am using is a spanking new Macintosh laptop with many gigabytes of storage and enormous computing power. Its screen is a marvel of full-color clarity; it has a built-in video camera and microphone, and hence allows multiple methods of input and output. Yet it has a QWERTY keyboard. Why QWERTY?

The QWERTY keyboard, named for the order of the keys on the left side of the first row of letter keys, was invented in 1873 by Christopher Sholes, a Milwaukee newspaper editor. Its purpose was to split up keys that were commonly hit serially so that a too-fast typist would not jam the associated type bars. In addition to its primary goal of slowing things down, it also aided left-handed English language typists, for far more words can be typed with only the keys under the left hand than under the right.

Now, since its purpose has been long anachronistic, why do we still persist in using it? The reason is, of course, the power of convention. After it became the conventional keyboard layout and touch typists learned it, they were loath to give it up and learn a different system, even if the newer system was demonstrably superior. And so now, almost 150 years later, QWERTY has survived; and, because virtually all subsequent generations learn to type using it, the likelihood of its being improved remains small.

More here.