Brian Greene in The New York Times:

THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it’s one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system. The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that may destroy the planet.

After more than a decade of development and construction, involving thousands of scientists from dozens of countries at a cost of some $8 billion, the “on” switch for the collider was thrown this week. So what we can expect? The collider’s workings are straightforward: at full power, trillions of protons will be injected into the otherwise empty track and set racing in opposite directions at speeds exceeding 99.999999 percent of the speed of light — fast enough so that every second the protons will cycle the entire track more than 11,000 times and engage in more than half a billion head-on collisions.

The raison d’être for creating this microscopic maelstrom derives from Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, which declares that much like euros and dollars, energy (“E”) and matter or mass (“m”) are convertible currencies (with “c” — the speed of light — specifying the fixed conversion rate). By accelerating the protons to fantastically high speeds, their collisions provide a momentary reservoir of tremendous energy, which can then quickly convert to a broad spectrum of other particles. It is through such energy-matter conversion that physicists hope to create particles that would have been commonplace just after the big bang, but which for the most part have long since disintegrated. Here’s a brief roundup of the sort of long-lost particles the collisions might produce and the mysteries they may help unravel.

More here.

///
Elsewhere
Derek Walcott

(For Stephen Spender)

Somewhere a white horse gallops with its mane
plunging round a field whose sticks
are ringed with barbed wire, and men
break stones or bind straw into ricks.

Somewhere women tire of the shawled sea’s
weeping, for the fishermen’s dories
still go out. It is blue as peace.
Somewhere they’re tired of torture stories.

That somewhere there was an arrest.
Somewhere there was a small harvest
of bodies in the truck. Soldiers rest
somewhere by a road, or smoke in a forest.

Somewhere there is the conference rage
at an outrage. Somewhere a page
is torn out, and somehow the foliage
no longer looks like leaves but camouflage.

Somewhere there is a comrade,
a writer lying with his eyes wide open
on mattress ticking, who will not read
this, or write. How to make a pen?

And here we are free for a while, but
elsewhere, in one-third, or one-seventh
of this planet, a summary rifle butt
breaks a skull into the idea of a heaven

where nothing is free, where blue air
is paper-frail, and whatever we write
will be stamped twice, a blue letter,
its throat slit by the paper knife of the state.

Through these black bars
hollowed faces stare. Fingers
grip the cross bars of these stanzas
and it is here, because somewhere else

their stares fog into oblivion
thinly, like the faceless numbers
that bewilder you in your telephone
diary. Like last year’s massacres.

The world is blameless. The darker crime
is to make a career of conscience,
to feel through our own nerves the silent scream
of winter branches, wonders read as signs.

From The Arkansas Testament
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987)

///

Kai Wright in The Root:

It’s difficult to remember just how ho-hum the political stakes felt in the 1990s, a time when our country’s prosperity and stability made leadership seem secondary to things like ideology, faith and personality. People who came of age in that era could still debate deep, academic questions like whether history is shaped by the person or the moment, whether great times or great leaders define us. Back then, there was nothing to force the scary question of what happens when leaders crumble amid great crises. On the seventh anniversary of Sept. 11, we don’t have to speculate. The 9/11 anniversary will inevitably prompt many to take stock of George W. Bush’s soon-ending tenure. For many, his presidency will be cast in the moment those planes crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and by the high-stakes political battles that followed that frightening morning. But the most crucial lessons of both 9/11 and the Bush presidency lie in neither national security nor partisan politics.

The most urgent truth for us to understand is that the Bush era has been defined by our president’s steadfast refusal to be in command and by our nation’s collective unwillingness to value real leadership. As we finally end our white-knuckle ride with Bush, we must realize that our future turns on our ability to differentiate between someone seeking to take power and someone committed to lead.

More here.

From Scientific American:

An alcohol-busting enzyme may help prevent heart attack damage, according to a new study in Science. Researchers report that aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 (ALDH2), an enzyme important for processing alcohol in the human body, clears harmful toxins produced in cells when blood flow is blocked in the heart—and a new drug can switch it on.

Red wine has long been toted as a preventive measure against cardiac disease. In fact, heart cells exposed to ethanol in the laboratory actually recover better when researchers temporarily stop the flow of oxygenated blood to them. The study published today suggests that ALDH2 may contribute to wine’s beneficial effects. The enzyme, activated as cells work to clear alcohol, also eliminates toxic by-products from the breakdown of fats in cells during a heart attack—thereby reducing damage to this vital organ.

During a cardiac event, blood flow to the heart ceases. Free radicals (highly reactive molecules released during energy production) accumulate in cells struggling through oxygen deprivation, damaging critical fats and proteins and increasing the chance of premature cell death. ALDH2 may help heart cells survive this onslaught by repairing some of the damaged fats, according to the study. Although not all cardiac damage is avoided, “any time you can save cells, you have a better chance of recovery,” says study co-author Thomas Hurley, a biochemist at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis.

More here.

From Nature:

Creative ideas are not always solo strokes of genius, argues Ed Catmull, the computer-scientist president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review. Frequently, he says, the best ideas emerge when talented people from different disciplines work together.

This week, Nature begins a series of six Essays that illustrate Catmull’s case. Each recalls a conference in which a creative outcome emerged from scientists pooling ideas, expertise and time with others — especially policy-makers, non-governmental organizations and the media. Each is written by someone who was there, usually an organizer or the meeting chair. Because the conferences were chosen for their societal consequences, we’ve called our series ‘Meetings that Changed the World’.

This week, François de Rose relives the drama of the December 1951 conference at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris that led to the creation of CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory based near Geneva.

More here.  And this is the first essay of the series:

As a young French diplomat taking my first steps in international affairs, I had the privilege of representing my country for several years at a United Nations commission in the late 1940s. The United States, under the leadership of the financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch and the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, wanted the United Nations to be given oversight of all the world’s nuclear weapons and nuclear power — the so-called Baruch plan. The plan failed, but as France was a keen supporter, it gave me the opportunity to work with Oppenheimer. We met frequently to discuss tactics and strategy and soon became friends.

One day, Oppenheimer told me of a problem that was very much on his mind. Most of America’s best physicists, he said, had like him been trained, or had worked, in Europe’s pre-war laboratories. He believed that Europe’s shaken nations did not have the resources to rebuild their basic physics infrastructure. He felt they would no longer be able to remain scientific leaders unless they pooled their money and talent. Oppenheimer also believed that it would be “basically unhealthy” if Europe’s physicists had to go to the United States or the Soviet Union to conduct their research.

The solution, Oppenheimer felt, was to find a way to enable Europe’s physicists to collaborate.

More here.  [Thanks to Laura Claridge Oppenheimer.]

David Haglund in Slate:

Just released for a third time on DVD, The Big Lebowski has, in a decade, inspired a following to rival all cinematic cults, complete with annual festivals, monthly podcasts, and teachings to live by. At the heart of this denomination is the Dude, brilliantly incarnated by Jeff Bridges as a Zen slob whose three great loves are weed, white Russians, and bowling. And the Dude is indeed a fantastic character. Ten years on, though, the movie’s most striking role belongs to John Goodman as Walter Sobchak: a hawkish, slightly unhinged Vietnam vet and the Dude’s best friend and bowling partner. Watching The Big Lebowski in 2008, it becomes clear that appreciating Walter is essential to understanding what the Coen brothers are up to in this movie, which is slyer, more political, and more prescient than many of its fans have recognized. Perhaps that’s because Walter, with his bellowing, Old Testament righteousness and his deeply entrenched militarism, is an American type that barely registered on the pop-culture landscape 10 years ago. He’s a neocon.

More here.

Results from an experiment by the Center for Deliberative Democracy, for this election season:

A national experiment in public online deliberation, sponsored by By the People in partnership with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation as part of the Dialogues in Democracy project, reveals what citizens would think about their role in a democracy-if only they became more informed about the issues and talked about them together. Over 1,300 citizens from around the country participated in this experiment over four weeks in fall 2007. A nationally representative sample was recruited and randomly assigned to deliberate about the issues (301 participants) or to simply answer survey questions before and after (1,000 person control group). The results show that once people talk about the issues and become more informed about them, they change their views in significant, and sometimes surprising, ways.

“We put all of America in a virtual room to consider the future of citizenship,” said James Fishkin, Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, which conducted the poll in conjunction with YouGov America. “The results are thoughtful and balanced and deserve to be considered by policymakers everywhere.” Sample results will be featured on the By the People national broadcast, airing in January on PBS.

The discussions focused on four aspects of the role of citizens in a democracy: political participation, exercising choice, becoming informed and public service. The discussions focused on four aspects of the role of citizens in a democracy: political participation, exercising choice, becoming informed and public service. In each case there were statistically significant changes of opinion and gains in information. The sample learned a lot and changed its views. In fact, 39 out of 56 policy questions (66%) changed significantly among the deliberators from the beginning to the end of the process.

William Dalrymple in the FT:

From a distance, Tarapith looked like just any other Bengali village, with its palm weave huts, and still, cool fishpond. But here one building dominated all the others: the great temple, which rose above the surrounding village like a cathedral in medieval Europe. Its base was a thick-walled red brick chamber, broken by an arcade of arches and rising to a great white pinnacle, like the snow capping of a Himalayan peak.

Tarapith is regarded as one of the most powerful holy places in India, the abode of the Devi’s Third Eye. Yet despite the reputed power of its presiding deity, compared with the other great pilgrimage sites of the region, Tarapith is little visited. A thin line of pilgrims were queuing to do darshan (pay homage) to the image of the goddess, but although it was approaching the time for the evening arti, the place was still surprisingly empty for such a famous shrine.

The reason for this, I had been told in Calcutta, was that Tarapith had a sinister reputation, notorious for the unsavoury “left-handed” Tantric rituals which are daily performed in the temple. Stranger things still were rumoured to take place in the nearby cremation ground after sunset. Here the goddess was said to live, and at midnight – so Bengalis believe – Tara can be glimpsed in the shadows drinking the blood of the goats slaughtered day after day in an effort to propitiate her anger.

From The Washington Post:

Now in his mid-70s, Roman Polanski seems finally to have slowed down a bit. He lives in France with his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, to whom he apparently is devoted. According to Christopher Sandford, who has also written several biographies of rock musicians, people who know him “insist that Polanski is ‘almost ludicrously mild-mannered,’ ‘nearly teetotal’ and even an ‘occasional churchgoer.’ ” The “top moment” of his day, he has said, comes when he drops his children off at school: “It’s the best. It’s great to see them walking away into this school. It’s a moving moment.”

As if to underscore his autumnal mood, three years ago Polanski released his 17th film, an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” that is surprisingly mellow, even sentimental, perhaps because he is believed to have made it for his children. It was released only three years after “The Pianist,” one of the three films of his that rank among postwar classics — the others being “Knife in the Water” (1962) and “Chinatown” (1974) — and the one that brought him, at last, an Academy Award, and, with it, something approximating the acceptance and forgiveness of his peers.

Nobody who pays even the slightest attention to the headlines needs to be told that the past decade or so of Polanski’s life stands in stark, even startling, contrast to much of the rest of it.

More here.

Anthony Lewis in the New York Review of Books:

Since the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was exposed, in April 2004, the Bush administration has maintained that any mistreatment was the work of a few “bad apples.” No action has been taken against any higher-up, military or civilian. But a steady accumulation of disclosures, capped in June by a Senate committee report and hearing, has made it clear that abusive treatment of prisoners was a deliberate policy that came from the top—the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and the White House.

In July 2002 the office of the Pentagon’s general counsel made a survey of the techniques used in a Pentagon program designed to teach ways of resisting torture by enemy forces. (The program focused especially on techniques used by Chinese forces during the Korean War to induce American prisoners to confess falsely to such things as using germ warfare.) In August, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, issued a secret fifty-page memorandum concluding that the president had plenary power to order the torture of prisoners in the war on terror. It built on an earlier memo by John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, which had been approved by Alberto Gonzales, then President Bush’s White House counsel. Bybee’s legal conclusions were incorporated into a memorandum prepared for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

More here.

Amazon.com has an interesting map of which states buy more “red” or “blue” books:

Go here for much more information.

Most people would not even know that this year is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade by the United States government. After a robust discussion in Great Britain in 2007 (their bicentennial), we have been mostly silent. It is a shame. Worse, it is a perpetuation of injustice.

The slave ship is a ghost ship, sailing around the edges of our consciousness. We pretend it is not there, but it haunts us. It also challenges us: a telling test of any society that considers itself to be a democracy is its ability to face the dark pages of its history. Do we dare in this post-9/11 age to look back on the terror that was instrumental to the making of America?

George Washington struggled with slavery. Do we struggle with its legacy? What are the costs if we do not? I think we have a moral accounting ahead of us. Justice and a more humane future demand it.

more from The American Scholar here.

One method of torture used in Florentine jails during the glorious days of the Renaissance was the strappado: a prisoner was hoisted into the air by a rope attached to his wrists, which had been tied behind his back, and then suddenly dropped toward the floor as many times as it took to get him to confess. Since the procedure usually dislocated the shoulders, tore the muscles, and rendered one or both arms useless, it is remarkable that Niccolò Machiavelli, after reportedly undergoing six such “drops,” asked for pen and paper and began to write. Machiavelli had nothing to confess. Although his name had been found on an incriminating list, he had played no part in a failed conspiracy to murder the city’s newly restored Medici rulers. (Some said that it was Giuliano de’ Medici who had been targeted, others that it was his brother Cardinal Giovanni.) He had been imprisoned for almost two weeks when, in February, 1513, in a desperate bid for pardon, he wrote a pair of sonnets addressed to the “Magnificent Giuliano,” mixing pathos with audacity and apparently inextinguishable wit. “I have on my legs, Giuliano, a pair of shackles,” he began, and went on to report that the lice on the walls of his cell were as big as butterflies, and that the noise of keys and padlocks boomed around him like Jove’s thunderbolts. Perhaps worried that the poems would not impress, he announced that the muse he had summoned had hit him in the face rather than render her services to a man who was chained up like a lunatic. To the heir of a family that prided itself on its artistic patronage, he submitted the outraged complaint “This is the way poets are treated!”

more from The New Yorker here.

W. H. Auden’s imaginary academy for poets, described in his essay “The Poet and the City” from The Dyer’s Hand (1962), is of a clear practical bent, for as well as poetry the curriculum requires its students to undertake allotment-keeping and the care of a domestic animal. The habit of situating the useful alongside the beautiful also animates his prose writing. Having established himself in America – “so big, so friendly and so rich” – during the 1940s, he could rely on reviewing and journalism and teaching, the occupation of his winters, to earn him a living. At the same time these commissions provided him with a framework in which to discuss his religious and historical concerns as they emerged in his poetry, while creating the opportunity to write important extended literary-critical pieces such as The Enchafèd Flood and material collected in The Dyer’s Hand. In return for these labours, as it were, Auden wrote “Under Sirius”, “Bucolics”, “Memorial for the City”, “Deftly, admiral, cast your fly”, “The Shield of Achilles”, “Homage to Clio” and “Horae Canonicae”, poems which complete the major phase of his work and would in the case of most other poets form grounds for a high reputation in themselves.

more from the TLS here.

///
Air
W.S. Merwin

Naturally it is night.
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way
Which has a strange sound.

This way the dust, that way the dust.
I listen to both sides
But I keep right on.
I remember the leaves sitting in judgment
And then winter.

I remember the rain with its bundle of roads.
The rain taking all its roads.
Nowhere.

Young as I am, old as I am,

I forget tomorrow, the blind man.
I forget the life among the buried windows.
The eyes in the curtains.
The wall
Growing through the immortelles.
I forget silence
The owner of the smile.

This must be what I wanted to be doing,
Walking at night between the two deserts,
Singing.

From The Moving Target (Atheneum, 1963)

///

From The City Journal:

Today, we shop for cut-rate hotels on Travelocity, bargain for airfares on Priceline, and seek reliable information on everything from computers to flat-screen TVs at CNET. The same information explosion is occurring in health care. Dozens of websites, such as WebMD, Revolution Health, and eHealthInsurance, now offer consumers up-to-the-minute information on medical conditions, drugs, and insurance options, as well as basic quality information on doctors and hospitals. Internet-savvy patients can walk into their doctors’ offices knowing more about the latest treatments than their physicians do.

Critics counter that health care is more complicated than hotels. Without someone to help manage complex information, they point out, patients may find themselves overwhelmed by options, fall prey to snake-oil salesmen, or fail to see that they have received incorrect diagnoses or poor treatment plans. But where critics see a problem, entrepreneurs see an opportunity. Companies are finding ways to make even the most complicated medical decisions simpler for patients.

Take the Boston-based firm Best Doctors, founded in 1989 by Harvard Medical School professors. Best Doctors uses peer evaluations of physicians—polling 50,000 doctors worldwide in 400 medical specialties—to identify leading medical experts and then makes them available to 10 million patients in 30 countries. Normally, insurance companies limit patients’ access to specialists by requiring prior authorization for referrals, limiting access to preferred networks, or asking patients to pay more out of pocket. Patients whose employers offer Best Doctors, on the other hand, can go directly to the firm without prior authorization whenever they have serious medical problems and need help making decisions.

One such patient is John de Beck, a California teacher diagnosed with prostate cancer.

More here.

This is an anthology of many voices—from Henry David Thoreau, writing from Concord in 1837, to Bill McKibben, the editor of this volume, composing his introduction high in the Yosemite backcountry last year. American Earth contains essays, speeches, and poems by roughly one hundred contributors. Everyone in this book is strong-minded, strong-willed, and strong-stomached, and every piece in this anthology is committed at heart to being useful, instructive, and reasonable. There are no Lear-like screams here, nothing like the final dementia of someone who realizes he’s traded his birthright for nothing.

Most of the authors in American Earth would agree in principle with Wendell Berry when he explains that he doesn’t like having to choose sides in a debate between extremists who believe that returning to nature will save us and extremists who think that technology will. “I would prefer to stay in the middle,” Berry writes, “not to avoid taking sides, but because I think the middle is a side, as well as the real location of the problem.” Since those words were written, twenty-one years ago, the edges have closed in. In the late ’90s, the middle of the debate looked to Julia Butterfly Hill like two years living in the crown of a redwood tree. From the bitter end of the Bush administration, Hill’s middle looks like a surprisingly sweet-natured place, as middling as Thoreau’s cabin outside Concord.

more from Bookforum here.

When Aimé Césaire died in Fort-de-France, Martinique on April 17, 2008, Ségolène Royal and others called for him to be buried in the Panthéon in Paris, alongside Rousseau, Hugo, and Zola. Away from the land of his ancestors, the acclaimed poet and long-time mayor of Martinique’s capital Fort-de-France could be claimed for France. But the obituaries make clear that Césaire’s legacy is both powerful and troubling.

The writer who once celebrated Haiti as the country where “black men stood up in order to affirm, for the first time, their determination to create a new world, a free world,” stood by, a powerless politician, as his own country turned into an acquiescent neo-colony. He had hoped to make the former colony a full partner in the economic and social benefits of the post-war metropole. It did not work. Harsh economic inequalities, reflected in de facto segregation by color and status no less effective for lack of legal sanction, remained. As late as 1973, Edouard Glissant noted that in Fort-de-France a cinema boasted “la salle de l’élite.” Even now Fort-de-France stagnates in its ongoing role as accommodating child of Mother France, while passive consumerism and cultural dependency stifle local initiative.

more from Boston Review here.

Beautiful Losers — the show, the book, the movement, the movie — is probably the most acclaimed template for crossover between Lowbrow and mainstream, though its impact is more readily observable in the world of commercial graphic design than the Art World. Scene svengali Aaron Rose — whose Alleged Gallery in ’90s Manhattan was the flash point of the BL submovement — has finally completed the documentary component of his marketing Gesamtkunstwerk, and it’s actually very good. The artists mostly come off as nice folks, many struggling with the politics of their commercial success. Between the talking heads, Rose and co-director Joshua Leonard have pieced together bits of archival footage (Mark Gonzales!) into a visually hypnotic montage that echoes the stoner, street-based BL aesthetic.

There’s maybe a little too much echo in other areas. Weren’t punk rock and graffiti art and skateboarding and Tom Waits hobo-beatnik chic and street credibility all over with by 1987? At the absolute latest? And aren’t there hundreds — if not thousands — of little scenes like this all over America, and the world? Layer upon layer of dubious nostalgia separates Beautiful Losers from its alleged subcultural authenticity, and we find ourselves obliviously subsumed by a myth of community, a niche-market simulation of counterculture like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel.

more from the LA Weekly here.