Patricia Fara reviews the book by Richard Holmes, in the Literary Review:

Whatever C P Snow may have decreed about an unbridgeable divide between the Two Cultures, Romantic writers were fully aware of recent scientific discoveries. As a twenty-year-old medical student, John Keats spent a drink-fuelled night enthusing over a newly purchased verse translation of Homer’s Iliad. Early the next morning, he took less than four hours to set down his own famous poem, in which he compared his feelings with those of ‘some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken’. Keats was referring to William Herschel, the astronomer who had effectively enlarged the solar system at the end of the eighteenth century by detecting a sixth planet, now known as Uranus, but initially named after George III. At school, Keats and his class mates had learnt about gravity through role play out in the yard: while one pupil remained stationary to act as the sun, the other child-planets circled round at different speeds and distances to form a living orrery, the human equivalent of the moving mechanical model so dramatically painted by the Enlightenment’s great artist of science and industry, Joseph Wright of Derby.

Wright’s famous picture of this astronomical instrument adorns the cover of Richard Holmes’s stellar collective biography, The Age of Wonder. Justly renowned as Britain’s greatest literary historian of the Romantic period, Holmes, in his latest book, gives a gripping account of the scientific research that inspired a sense of wonder in poets and experimenters alike. He calls for, and also delivers, a new approach to science’s history, one that focuses on scientists as individuals rather than as impersonal agents of discovery, and that rejects rigid distinctions between science and the arts, or between science and religion.

More here.

Part 2:

From The New York Times:

Sound Off | John M. Broder

The images and body language of Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain spoke volumes tonight, even with the television muted. I watched a good portion of the debate with the sound off because I was writing on deadline. C-Span showed the entire debate in split screen and whenever I looked up I saw Mr. McCain looking across at Mr. Obama with a strained look of incredulity, or the pained smile of an indulgent teacher listening to a recitation from a particularly dim-witted student.

There were obvious flashes of anger and aggression, when it looked as if Mr. McCain might actually cross the vertical split-screen line separating the combatants and wring Mr. Obama’s neck. (I may have been watching too much “Saturday Night Live.”) Toward the end of the debate, I saw Mr. McCain use the universal “air quotes” gesture, a clear sign he was mocking something Mr. Obama had said. It almost didn’t matter what. Mr. Obama, for his part, either listened stolidly, scribbled notes or smiled at his opponent with that Ronald Reagan “There you go again” smile.

For much of the time Mr. McCain was on the attack, Mr. Obama just sat there absorbing the blows as if wearing body armor. Which, in a sense, he was, in the form of a double-digit lead in national polls.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Remember the good old days, way back in 2000, when NBC’s Tim Russert showed how important “Florida! Florida! Florida!” was by scribbling on a whiteboard with a marker pen? That whiteboard is now sitting in a museum – the Smithsonian, in fact – and computer wizards are serving up a whole new set of tools for visualizing politics. Visualizations can cut through the myriad opinion polls to show you where Republican presidential candidate John McCain and Democratic rival Barack Obama stand int the only polls that matters – and which states could be as important this year as Florida was in 2000.

For online users who aren’t content with one source for their political prognostication, “The Takeaway” radio show offers an electoral-vote tracker that combines predictions from 15 media organizations, ranging from Fox News to the FiveThirtyEight blog. The squares for each state are proportional to the vote count, and the placement of states in the toss-up section could lead you to conclude this is the year of “Virginia! Colorado! Florida!”

More here.

The debate is heating up on the role of CRA (and its, ahem, “neo-Marxist” supporters like ACORN) vs. the role of Phil Gramm’s Commodities Future Modernization Act, which helped grow the market in credit default swap from $900 billion in 2000 to $62 trillion market today.  (The chat over at Business Week is interesting, as is this exchange between Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Byron York of National Review in NY Magazine.) [H/t: Mark Blyth and James Leighton, respectively.]  Ellen Seidman over at The New America Foundation:

The sub-prime debacle has many causes, including greed, lack of and ineffective regulation, failures of risk assessment and management, and misplaced optimism. But CRA is not to blame.

First, the timing is all wrong. CRA was enacted in 1977, its companion disclosure statute, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) in 1975. While many of us warned against bad subprime lending before the turn of the millennium, the massive breakdown of underwriting and extension of risky products far down the income scale-without bothering to even check on income-was primarily a post-2003 phenomenon. To blame a statute enacted in 1977 for something that happened 25 years later takes a fair amount of chutzpah.

It’s even more outrageous because of the good CRA clearly did in between. The 1990s were the heyday of CRA enforcement-for a variety of reasons including the raft of mergers and acquisitions that followed the 1994 Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Act, increased scrutiny of lending practices by the media and activism by housing advocacy groups and tougher enforcement by the Clinton Administration.That period saw increased home mortgage lending to lower income households and in lower income communities by the banks and thrifts covered by CRA, and a steady increase in the homeownership rate, especially for lower income and minority families. (See The Joint Center for Housing Studies). In addition, there was significant investment in affordable rental housing, community facilities and broader community economic development, directly by banks and thrifts earning investment credit under CRA or indirectly through bank investment in Community Development Financial Institutions and other community-based organizations.

Christopher Buckley in The Daily Beast:

I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen’s mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. I didn’t want to put NR in an awkward position.

Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it’s pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review—a friend of 30 years—emailed me that he thought my opinions “cretinous.” One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have “betrayed”—the b-word has been much used in all this—my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, “Cancel my subscription,” I was able to quote the title of my father’s last book, a delicious compendium of his NR “Notes and Asides”: Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.

Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted—rather briskly!—by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.

I’ve wondered about for a while whether the mathematical techniques for assessing risk alter the structure of risk and risk taking behavior itself, i.e, whether the act of measurement itself is not exogenous to what is being measured.  Taleb suggests that this may be the case in this wider discussion of the origins of the suprime crisis with Bloomberg.

Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker:

“Etiquette,” revised and edited by her great-granddaughter-in-law, a former flight attendant, is now in its seventeenth edition. (Thumb tabs have been added for ease of reference.) Various Post relations write deportment columns for, among other publications, Good Housekeeping, Parents, and the Boston Globe. On its Web site, the Emily Post Institute provides guidance on subjects ranging from holiday tipping (for a pet groomer, one session’s fee is appropriate) to exercising at the gym (“Wipe up your sweat, please!”). There is even a feature called “What Would Emily Do?,” which each week takes up a new, post-Post question, such as whether it’s permissible to text-message from a luncheon party and “How do you tell a co-worker that she has an odor?”

“Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners” (Random House; $30), by Laura Claridge, is the first full-length biography of the author to appear. (Post’s son, Ned, published an affectionate, ghostwritten memoir, “Truly Emily Post,” back in 1961.) Claridge, a former English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, has written previous biographies of Norman Rockwell and the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. In turning her attention to Post, she takes up two mysteries. One has to do with etiquette: why, in a supposedly classless society like America, do so many people fret about table manners? And the other has to do with “Etiquette”: how did Post convert social disgrace into such a triumph?

More here.

The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat. Having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

more from The Daily Beast here (h/t Andrew Sullivan).

It’s certainly not morning in America.

Yet it doesn’t have to be twilight either. America can pull through the current economic crisis with a dose of political maturity and a bit of luck. Success will mean the end of the Reagan era, of an ideology that has brought the country to its knees.

Ronald Reagan told us that government was the problem, and that low taxes and deregulation were the solutions. The result, even more than Americans recognize, is a government so shrunken in skill and mandate that our gravest problems – financial collapse, natural hazards like Hurricane Katrina, broken health care and education, unsustainable energy systems, and growing global instability – are left without a serious response.

Either we once again invest in our future, notably through an expanded public sector, or we will lose our future.

I presume that John McCain and Sarah Palin will lose the election. Never has a national ticket been less equipped intellectually, temperamentally, and practically to confront America’s problems than this one. I also presume that Palin’s winks to America will prove to be the equivalent of the Cheshire Cat’s grin: the last expressions of an ideology disappearing from the scene.

more from Fortune here.

Perhaps the most amazing of the many remarkable aspects of Louise Bourgeois is that if she had died in her middle seventies we would not have known how daring, strange, ambitious, or disturbing an artist she could be. We would not have known how lively a colorist this ninety-six-year-old sculptor is capable of being; and we would have been deprived of the full measure of one of the loveliest aspects of her art, her feeling for a range of weathered, frayed, and matte textures. Bourgeois of course is not especially renowned for the sensuous qualities of her work, let alone qualities connected with the word “lovely.” The artist, who was born in France in 1911 and has lived in New York since 1938 (when she arrived here to be the wife of the American art historian Robert Goldwater, whom she had met in Paris), has long been recognized for her adventurousness with diverse sculptural materials. She is probably best known, though, for the way her pieces, which for most of her career have blended abstract and representational elements, exude a note of something ambiguous and hidden—and frequently sexual and sinister.

more from the NYRB here.

As he said about the Maker of All Things in the song he called “God,” which was really about himself, John Lennon is a concept by which we measure our pain. Lennon made a great many things both miraculous and ungodly during his foreshortened and intensely public life, and much of what he did brought us grief, in the multiple meanings of the word, or granted us the effect of grief’s denial: ecstasy. Lennon and the three mates for whom he served as semi- official leader came to America just in time to provide gleeful relief from our famous post-Kennedy malaise. He proceeded to outrage conservative Christians who were protective of the bigness of Jesus; he vexed aesthetic fundamentalists who were reluctant to accept rock and roll as art; he infuriated rock traditionalists who were even more reluctant to accept the conceptual avant- garde; he irritated Paul fans; he conferred upon us the irrepressibly unpleasant Yoko and released “Whatever Gets You Through the Night”; and then he abandoned us, withdrawing from public life for nearly five years. Finally, through his death at the hands of a crazed fan in 1980, he made us face the darkest potential of the mixed-up, out-of-control feelings of love and fury that he had stirred and refracted with a smirk.

more from TNR here.

///
“Colatteral damage is a shroud woven by some to cover the
corpse of thier morality so as not to sully their self-perception.”
–A.P. Cruller

Brave World
Tony Hoagland

But what about the courage

of the cancer cell

that breaks out from the crowd

it has belonged to all its life
…………………………….

like a housewife erupting

from her line at the grocery store

because she just can’t stand

the sameness anymore?
…………………………….

What about the virus that arrives

in town like a traveler

from somewhere faraway

with suitcases in hand,
…………………………….

who only wants a place

to stay, a chance to get ahead

in the land of opportunity,

but who smells bad,
…………………………….

talks funny, and reproduces fast?

What about the microbe that

hurls its tiny boat straight

into the rushing metabolic tide,
…………………………….

no less cunning and intrepid

than Odysseus; that gambles all

to found a city

on an unknown shore?
…………………………….

What about their bill of rights,

their access to a full-scale,

first-class destiny?

their chance to realize
…………………………….

maximum potential?-which, sure,

will come at the expense

of someone else, someone

who, from a certain point of view,
…………………………….

is a secondary character,

whose weeping is almost

too far off to hear,
…………………………….

a noise among the noises

coming from the shadows

of any brave new world.
////

///

From the TED website:

Physicist and surfer Garrett Lisi presents a controversial new model of the universe that — just maybe — answers all the big questions. If nothing else, it’s the most beautiful 8-dimensional model of elementary particles and forces you’ve ever seen.

[Thanks to Natasha Dantzig.]

Arjun Appadurai at The Immanent Frame:

Last week as I listened, along with many other Americans and others around the world, to President Bush’s most recent effort to reassure us about the current economic meltdown I had a “Road to Damascus” moment.  It happened as I heard Bush repeat the word “faith”: faith in America’s institutions, faith in its workers, faith in capitalism, faith in our capacity to survive other disasters (such as 1929 and 2001). And, of course, the faith we needed to weather the recent crisis and get to the other side, such faith, in Bush’s rhetoric, being not only the need of the moment but the fulcrum for the journey to recovery.

I instantly saw that a great feat in reverse discourse engineering had occurred: we had moved into the era of the “Faith-Based Economy.” Many of us had already developed a certain worry about the place of “faith” in the Bush administration’s weird form of ecumenical evangelism, which had used the idea of faith-based organizations to allow the covert infiltration of a certain brand of religion into American civic life, with a definite bias towards white, Protestant, evangelical forms rather than say, to Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Rastafarian forms.

But now we are in a new Weberian moment, where Calvinist ideas of proof, certainty of election through the rationality of good works, and faith in the rightness of predestination, are not anymore the backbone of thrift, calculation and bourgeois risk-taking. Now faith is about something else.

More here.

From The Guardian:

After an “emotionally draining” and closely fought final judging session, Aravind Adiga, one of the two debut novelists on the Man Booker shortlist, was last night awarded the £50,000 prize for The White Tiger, a bracingly modern novel about the dark side of the new India. Adiga, 33, is a surprise winner: at long odds he batted aside the claims of veteran writers on the shortlist such as Sebastian Barry and Amitav Ghosh. He is only the is only the fourth first time novelist to win the prize, after Keri Hulme in 1985, Arundhati Roy in 1997 and DBC Pierre in 2003 – and he is the second youngest after Ben Okri, who won in 1991 aged 32. Michael Portillo, the chair of the judges, talked of a final panel meeting characterised by “passionate debate”. Adiga’s book won by a “sufficient”, but by no means unanimous, margin. “It was pretty close,” said Portillo, and in the last stages it was down to a battle between The White Tiger and one other book.

The White Tiger takes a sharp and unblinking look at the reality of India’s economic miracle. Its antihero and narrator, Balram Halwai, is a cocksure, uneducated young man, the son of an impoverished rickshaw driver. By lying, betraying and using his sharp intelligence, Balram makes his ascent into the heady heights of Bangalore’s big business. The writing of the novel, said Adiga, had come out of his career as a journalist, and his encounters – as a relatively privileged middle-class man – with members of India’s underclass.

More here.

From The New York Times:

…In a 1981 documentary called “The Day After Trinity,” Freeman Dyson, a reigning gray eminence of math and theoretical physics, as well as an ardent proponent of nuclear disarmament, described the seductive power that brought us the ability to create atomic energy out of nothing. “I have felt it myself,” he warned. “The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles—this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.”

…As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth’s nervous system (the Internet), it’s worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers. After all, the Wall Street titans loved swaps and derivatives because they were totally unregulated by humans. That left nobody but the machines in charge. How fitting then, that almost 30 years after Freeman Dyson described the almost unspeakable urges of the nuclear geeks creating illimitable energy out of equations, his son, George Dyson, has written an essay (published at Edge.org) warning about a different strain of technical arrogance that has brought the entire planet to the brink of financial destruction. George Dyson is an historian of technology and the author of “Darwin Among the Machines,” a book that warned us a decade ago that it was only a matter of time before technology out-evolves us and takes over.

His new essay—“Economic Dis-Equilibrium: Can You Have Your House and Spend It Too?”—begins with a history of “stock,” originally a stick of hazel, willow or alder wood, inscribed with notches indicating monetary amounts and dates.

More here.

Bonnie Goldstein in Slate:

A recently obtained four-page guide describing approved “tactics and techniques” to “break” detainees held at Guantanamo Bay (see below and the following three pages) repeats verbatim the official language describing survival resistance and escape training by the U.S. Navy. The 2002 Gitmo guidelines describe intimidation methods long favored by enemies we once judged less civilized than ourselves. These include “degradation” (“the insult slap is used to shock and intimidate,” Page 2); “physical debilitation” (the five approved “stress positions,” Pages 2 and 3); “isolation and monopolization of perception” (specifically, “hooding,” Page 3); and “demonstrated omnipotence” (i.e., “manhandling” and “placing a detainee forcibly against a … wall”).

No matter what method a questioner chooses, “interrogation safety” is a priority. When engaged, for example, in the “forceful removal of detainee’s clothing … to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor” the interrogator’s “[t]earing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.” Insult slaps “will be initiated no more than 12-14 inches (or one shoulder width) from the detainee’s face” (Page 2). When shoving a detainee up against a wall, the “interrogator must ensure the wall is smooth, firm, and free of projections” (Page 4). Mind that stucco!

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, “Citizen Kane,” at twenty-five. Herman Melville wrote a book a year through his late twenties, culminating, at age thirty-two, with “Moby-Dick.” Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one. In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the importance of precocity has hardened into an iron law. How old was T. S. Eliot when he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“I grow old . . . I grow old”)? Twenty-three. “Poets peak young,” the creativity researcher James Kaufman maintains. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the author of “Flow,” agrees: “The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the young.” According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, a leading authority on creativity, “Lyric poetry is a domain where talent is discovered early, burns brightly, and then peters out at an early age.”

A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon.

More here.