From Nature:

Now, a team led by David Reich of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lalji Singh of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, has probed more than 560,000 SNPs across the genomes of 132 Indian individuals from 25 diverse ethnic and tribal groups dotted all over India. The researchers showed that most Indian populations are genetic admixtures of two ancient, genetically divergent groups, which each contributed around 40-60% of the DNA to most present-day populations. One ancestral lineage — which is genetically similar to Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations — was higher in upper-caste individuals and speakers of Indo-European languages such as Hindi, the researchers found. The other lineage was not close to any group outside the subcontinent, and was most common in people indigenous to the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.

More here.

Gary Sick in The Daily Beast:

Iran has been a critical issue for the United States and Israel for a very long time. Seventeen years ago, in January 1992, the U.S. Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the House Republican Research Committee, asserted that there was a “98 percent certainty that Iran already had all (or virtually all) of the components required for two to three operational nuclear weapons.” That same month, Binyamin Netanyahu told the Knesset that “Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb… (The nuclear threat) must be uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.” In that same year, Robert Gates, then director of the CIA, asked, “Is [Iran’s nuclear program] a problem today?” He answered, “Probably not. But three, four, five years from now it could be a serious problem.” Three years later, a senior Israeli official declared: “If Iran is not interrupted in this program by some foreign power, it will have the device in more or less five years.”

Officially, both the United States and Israel now agree that Iran is unlikely to be able to produce a bomb until about 2013 or 2014—the same five-year window that was being predicted seventeen years ago in 1992.

More here. [Thanks to Tony Karon.]

From The Telegraph:

Scientists in the United States are trying to map the twisting ''tubes'' so they can be used to cut the cost of journeys in space.

Each one acts like a gravitational Gulf Stream, created from the complex interplay of attractive forces between planets and moons.

Depicted by computer graphics, the pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them.

The pathways connect sites called Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out.

Professor Shane Ross, from Virginia Tech in the US, said: ''Basically the idea is there are low energy pathways winding between planets and moons that would slash the amount of fuel needed to explore the solar system.

''These are freefall pathways in space around and between gravitational bodies. Instead of falling down, like you do on Earth, you fall along these tubes.

''Each of the tubes starts off narrow and small and as it gets further out it gets wider and might also split.

More here.

This NPR contest “has a simple premise: Listeners send in original short stories that can be read in three minutes or less. We're posting our favorite entries here every week until The New Yorker's James Wood picks our winning story and reads it on the air.” Amitava Kumar's piece:

The nurse left work at five o'clock.

She had seen the dead woman's husband sitting, near the entrance, under the yellow sign that Doctor Ahmed had hung some months ago. “While You Wait, Meditate.” He was sitting with his arms crossed, elbows cupped in the palms of his hands and hadn't looked up when she passed him on her way out.

Just before lunch, a convoy had come from the Army camp. A dark-skinned soldier, holding a small rifle in his left hand, threw open the office door and announced the Colonel. Doctor Ahmed had automatically stood up.

The Colonel was plump. He looked calm and extremely clean, the way bullfrogs do, gleaming green and gold in the mud. He put his baton on the table and asked the nurse to leave the office.

When Doctor Ahmed rang his bell, the nurse went back in and was told to get his wife, Zakia, from their home on the top floor. Usually, he just called her on the phone. The nurse hurried up, carrying news of the Colonel.

Which brings me to that Trilling essay I read before I saw Linklater’s Welles: It’s got to be considered in any consideration of genius. It’s a somewhat tortured meditation that goes to considerable lengths to argue that the one reason we should value Orwell is that he was not a genius. While this sounds like a negative virtue, not one you’d put on a résumé, Trilling gives it a positive spin: “Not being a genius” means “fronting the world with nothing more than one simple direct undeceived intelligence and a respect for the powers one does have. … We admire geniuses, we love them, but they discourage us. … They are great concentrations of intellect and emotion, we feel they have soaked up all the available power, monopolizing it and leaving none for us. We feel that if we cannot be as they, we can be nothing.” (The italics are mine.) Who knew that being a genius could be so contentious? And yet it’s a worthy sentiment: We should not use lack of genius as an excuse for ourselves to do nothing because we won’t do anything geniuslike.

more from Ron Rosenbaum at Slate here.

These days, the debate over how to write about reading is a cold affair: a de-militarized zone. I avoid the terms literature and criticism here, and perhaps even debate is too hifalutin a word to describe what has amounted to a decades-long pissing match between creative writers and critics. The current steely silence is evidence only of empty bladders; the combatants have become preoccupied with internal skirmishes. Not long ago, Cynthia Ozick, weighing in on a writers’ spat between Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus in Harper’s, announced that there was no good literary criticism happening despite the ongoing deluge from academic presses. Franzen and Marcus, arguing over how far fiction should bend toward publishing’s fickle sun, weren’t good models, either, Ozick said, and her proclamation was as much plea as elegy. Yet Ozick herself (Art & Ardor, Fame & Folly, etc.) is a pioneer of a wholly different kind of writing about reading, work that reads the self as closely as it reads the examined text and that is every bit as creative as it is critical. Writers are often reviewers—John Updike produced a smooth-flowing river of work, and Joyce Carol Oates’s hurried affairs appear often enough—but there is as well a kind of personal literary analysis, criticism that contemplates rather than argues, and while it’s never amounted to a formal trend or school, a consistent flow of this kind of response to literature has trickled along like an underground stream all the while the piss battles poisoned the surface.

more from J.C. Hallman at The Quarterly Conversation (my new favorite magazine) here.

With a few exceptions – Walt Whitman called him an “old Octopus” – Americans have been decidedly tolerant of Johnson’s bile, rarely taking his invective at face value. Instead we have looked past the bluster to the character of the man behind it. Without Johnson, America wouldn’t have had its own great dictionary – his collection of moral essays, “The Rambler,” inspired a young Noah Webster to dedicate his life to pursuing “a most exact course of integrity and virtue,” and to compiling his massive American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828. Two hundred and twenty-five years after Johnson’s death, it’s hard not to wonder if the great man’s eloquent venom was actually a case of “protesting too much.” The man whose own fortune was so closely tied to the burgeoning British empire, who roared in defense of the establishment even while charting his own enterprising course, may well have noticed a touch of himself in those ambitious rebels 3,000 miles away.

more from Joshua Kendall at The Boston Globe here.

Laura Miller in Salon:

You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published “A New Literary History of America” — the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily. You could do a lot worse, but I'm not sure you could do much better; this magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture.

Editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors have pitched the biggest tent conceivable, pegging each of the chronologically arranged essays in the book to “points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable.” With this in mind, they've produced a compendium that is neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too.

More here.

The Yin and Yang of It

For every peony, fifty ants.
For every waxing hive, a bear.

For each blossom the broodfouled
bee sticky with fungus, bumbling.

For every gut, a bot. For your beating
heart, the surgeon’s stent.

A brass knuckle on each finger,
in every nose a brass ring.

Dust in both your blue
irises, planed from a stubborn plank.

For each stump an ax, and for every ax
handle, a falling tree no one hears

before it rolls like a thoroughbred
over the jockey—

for every anxious hero sniffs
the plumed riderless horse

that will carry his empty boots
backwards in the stirrups.

by Joyce Peseroff

from Breakwater Review, 2009

Ana Finel Honigman in Interview:

Many publications parse the minutiae of celebrities' beauty regimes. But few of those forums actively engage with the potential psychological or sociological significance of beauty rituals for the famous faces, and the fans who follow them. New York- and Los Angeles-based video artist Alia Raza is addressing that arena. Raza has developed a video project that deconstructs the relationships between outward beauty, internal awareness of ones' own body and the peculiar tensions among people whose physical appearance is intimately linked with their professional or creative standing.

For “The Fragile White Blossoms Emit A Hypnotic Cascade Of Tropical Perfume Whose Sweet Heady Odor Leaves Its Victim Intoxicated” Raza presents ten silent videos in which Chloe Sevigny, Kim Gordon, Devendra Banhart, Patrik Ervell and figures in Lower East Side fashion engage distinctive beauty rituals, some of which Raza designs and some which exaggerate their own regimes, without interruption for twenty-eight minutes. A portion of the series will be presented at Paris's Palais de Tokyo, as part of Diane Pernet's A Shaded View on Fashion Film Festival.

Here we discuss distinctions between art and fashion, and between personal maintenance and philosophical self-consciousness:

ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: Did this project begin with your own beauty rituals?

ALIA RAZA: It really began with wanting to portray anxiety and self-consciousness. I don't mean self-conscious like being shy, I mean literal consciousness of our physical being, and the fact that we have to present ourselves to others. Some people go into the world with a lack of self-consciousness while others always feel uncomfortable in their own skin. A lot of times physical beauty is looked to as a cure for this discomfort. And there's an entire culture and several industries that support that notion, not to mention biology, society, and who knows what else. People think of beauty or the search for it as frivolous or vain. I definitely don't. I find it more disturbing, and that's what the project is about.

More here.

From Science:

Richard Prum suffered a bad break for someone who studies birds for a living: major hearing loss that rendered him unable to appreciate his subjects' songs. “I live in an acoustically flat world,” says Prum. So he's had to narrow his attention to what he could see: avian plumage. For the past decade or so, Prum has combined the studies of evolution and development to analyze feathers as “a kind of a tough problem in the evolution of novelty.” That's turned out to be more rewarding than Prum, a Yale University professor, ever imagined: Today he received $500,000 in an unrestricted 5-year gift from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Prum, 48, is one of seven scientists, two physicians, and an engineer among this year's 24 recipients of the MacArthur “genius” awards.

More here.

Jordan Davis in the Boston Review:

Poets steal. T.S. Eliot concealed this offhand assertion in plain sight 90 years ago in his essay on English playwright Philip Massinger: “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” It had the effect of recalibrating readers’ expectations for originality. All readers. Granted, this was the same effect Emerson achieved in his essay, “Quotation and Originality,” but the recursion supports Eliot’s point. Literary culture alternates between those periods when it refuses to look at anything new, and those when almost nothing like the old is allowed. As for the literary influence of other times and places, the emphasis shifts between defensive isolation and expansive engagement. At the moment, major anthologies of contemporary poetry from Germany, Russia, and Vietnam are appearing in the United States. Though the influence of these poetries on American letters has been muted, or at least restricted to a narrow list of headliners for the last fifty years, that may be about to change.

More here.

Reza Sayah at CNN:

As a little girl, Maria Toor Pakay would beat up boys.

Now, she dispenses of anyone who takes her on within the walls of a squash court.

Pakay, 18, is Pakistan's No. 1-ranked women's squash player. But what makes her story remarkable is that she hails from the country's tribal region of South Waziristan.

The region, along the border with Afghanistan, is home to the Taliban.

There, suicide attacks are a way of life. And the militants, bent on imposing a strict form of Islamic law, punish girls who attend school — let alone play sports.

“They have no future,” Pakay said. “They spend their entire lives in four walls in their home. Their ability is destroyed.”

But Pakay wasn't like most girls growing up. She sported a buzz cut and mixed with the boys.

More here.

Anthony Swofford (author of Jarhead) in the Barnes and Noble Review:

The best books succeed because they offer the reader a glimpse into a world that might otherwise be unknown, or unknown to most of us. The book at hand, Last Journey: A Father and Son in Wartime, is one of those books. The number of parents who have lost children in the current American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a small, albeit growing, number. The distinction is an awful one, the mark of experience that tears families apart, that leaves a wake of grief, anger, and remorse.

Last Journey is by Darrell Griffin Sr. and Darrell “Skip” Griffin Jr., a self-educated and widely read staff sergeant in the U.S. Army. His areas of interest were philosophy and theology. From his high school years and to the moment of his death, he devoured the giant works of the canon, books by Kierkegaard, Hume, and Nietzsche as well as more esoteric works such as Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotlean Tradition in Islam, by F. E. Peters.

The reader can't help but think that if senior members of the Bush administration had been as hungry for knowledge about the Middle East as Staff Sergeant Griffin the war would have turned out differently or might never have been fought. Skip's journal entries range from questions of being and justice to mind searing renderings of the suffering of Iraqi civilians and the deaths of fellow soldiers.

More here. See the New York Times review here.

Muntazer al-Zaidi in The Guardian:

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I apologise. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day. The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of patriotism. And if patriotism needs to speak out, then professionalism should be allied with it.

I didn't do this so my name would enter history or for material gains. All I wanted was to defend my country.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

“The Naked and the Dead is an enormously long novel, washed up by the choppy waters of disillusionment, leaving nothing to the imagination.” That's what David Dempsey had to say in a review on the novel for The New York Times in 1948. Dempsey went on to say that The Naked and the Dead revealed a great new talent in American fiction, Norman Mailer, but that the book was “not great.” A half-century after the publication of The Naked and the Dead and two years after Mailer's death, it's clear that Dempsey was both right and wrong. He sniffed out the general talent, but whiffed on the specific work.

No matter. The special risk of criticism is to be wrong in print, wrong for eternity. It is hard to blame Mr. Dempsey. The Naked and the Dead was not written for him. It is a novel that had to wait another 20 years for the America it envisioned to come fully into view. The Boomers were the ones who discovered, in Vietnam, that national greatness takes a toll. They began to doubt themselves.

But that came later. The Greatest Generation was known for one thing, primarily. Certainty. Certainty of place, of purpose, of duty, and of destiny. I exaggerate, but not that much. They called World War II “The Good War.” Moral absolutism came cheap then. Who was going to argue with the boys who put down the Third Reich?

Mailer never argued. He just kept talking and showing, talking and showing.

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Stephen Mihm in the Boston Globe:

Amid the hand-wringing and the self-flagellation, a few more cerebral commentators started to speak about the arrival of a “Minsky moment,” and a growing number of insiders began to warn of a coming “Minsky meltdown.”

“Minsky” was shorthand for Hyman Minsky, a hitherto obscure macroeconomist who died over a decade ago. Many economists had never heard of him when the crisis struck, and he remains a shadowy figure in the profession. But lately he has begun emerging as perhaps the most prescient big-picture thinker about what, exactly, we are going through. A contrarian amid the conformity of postwar America, an expert in the then-unfashionable subfields of finance and crisis, Minsky was one economist who saw what was coming. He predicted, decades ago, almost exactly the kind of meltdown that recently hammered the global economy.

In recent months Minsky’s star has only risen. Nobel Prize-winning economists talk about incorporating his insights, and copies of his books are back in print and selling well. He’s gone from being a nearly forgotten figure to a key player in the debate over how to fix the financial system.

But if Minsky was as right as he seems to have been, the news is not exactly encouraging. He believed in capitalism, but also believed it had almost a genetic weakness. Modern finance, he argued, was far from the stabilizing force that mainstream economics portrayed: rather, it was a system that created the illusion of stability while simultaneously creating the conditions for an inevitable and dramatic collapse.

In other words, the one person who foresaw the crisis also believed that our whole financial system contains the seeds of its own destruction. “Instability,” he wrote, “is an inherent and inescapable flaw of capitalism.”

Anthony Gottlieb in A More Intelligent Life:

Nietzsche famously said that there are no such things as facts, only interpretations. Be that as it may, every writer knows that there are certainly such things as factual mistakes. Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word that are perhaps the most pernicious. Once a “fact” has been pressed onto paper, it becomes a trusted source, and misinformation will multiply. The combination of human fallibility with Gutenberg’s invention of efficient printing in 1439 has, for all the revolutionary advantages of the latter, proved (in some respects) to be a toxic mixture.

Periodicals publish corrections in subsequent issues and some successful books are (expensively) reissued in new, improved editions. But in a better world, the book, magazine or newspaper in your hands would itself be updated when mistakes are discovered by its publisher. Thanks to the advent of electronic reading gadgets, like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader, such magic is getting closer. Old-fashioned, uncorrectable books may never disappear. Only futurologists—that is, people who specialise in being wrong about the future instead of the present—would dare to predict their utter demise. Yet it is now possible that the tyranny of print will meet some powerful resistance, and that readers will benefit.