From Scientific American:

Humans are hardwired to love the sweet, savory and salty foods that provide the energy, protein and electrolytes we need. In an age of mass-produced products laden with sugar and salt, however, our taste proclivities can readily bring on obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes—all among society’s biggest health problems. But what if a handful of tiny compounds could fool our brains into eating differently? That is the idea behind the new science of flavor modulation. Scientists who have unlocked the long-standing mystery of taste biology are developing inexpensive yet potent compounds that make foods taste sweeter, saltier and more savory (heartier) than they really are. By adding tiny amounts of these modulators to traditional foods, manufacturers could reduce the amount of sugar, salt and monosodium glutamate (MSG) needed to satisfy, resulting in healthier products.

San Diego–based Senomyx is at the forefront of this new technology, and large companies are responding. Nestlé started incorporating Senomyx’s savory flavor modulators in its bouillon products last year. Coca-Cola and Cadbury aim to begin using Senomyx’s compounds early in 2009. Senomyx is also designing bitterness blockers to make less palatable foods taste better, which could broaden the world’s sources of nutrients. For example, companies could use soy protein more widely, potentially feeding more people, if they could mask its bitter aftertaste. Such blockers could also make medicines taste better, which would encourage people to take them. By tricking our taste buds, Senomyx could save food makers a heaping teaspoon of money, allowing them to replace volumes of sugar, salt and other ingredients with minute quantities of cheap compounds. More important, taste modulators could revolutionize our health, making what tastes good to us actually be good for us.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Whether made of highly polished metal or of glass with a coating of metal on the back, mirrors have fascinated people for millennia: ancient Egyptians were often depicted holding hand mirrors. With their capacity to reflect back nearly all incident light upon them and so recapitulate the scene they face, mirrors are like pieces of dreams, their images hyper-real and profoundly fake. Mirrors reveal truths you may not want to see. Give them a little smoke and a house to call their own, and mirrors will tell you nothing but lies.

To scientists, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of mirrors make them powerful tools for exploring questions about perception and cognition in humans and other neuronally gifted species, and how the brain interprets and acts upon the great tides of sensory information from the external world. They are using mirrors to study how the brain decides what is self and what is other, how it judges distances and trajectories of objects, and how it reconstructs the richly three-dimensional quality of the outside world from what is essentially a two-dimensional snapshot taken by the retina’s flat sheet of receptor cells. They are applying mirrors in medicine, to create reflected images of patients’ limbs or other body parts and thus trick the brain into healing itself. Mirror therapy has been successful in treating disorders like phantom limb syndrome, chronic pain and post-stroke paralysis.

More here.

Rascal. Untitled.

Oil on canvas.

More of this New York based artist’s work here.

From The Atlantic.com:

As you may have heard, some 50 years after Betty Friedan sprang us from domestic jail, we women … seem to have made a mess of it. What do we want? Not to be men (wrong again, Freud!), at least not businessmen—although slacker men, sans futon and bong, might appeal. In these post-Lisa-Belkin-New-York-Times-Magazine-“Opt-Out” years, we’ve now learned the worst: even female Harvard graduates are fleeing high-powered careers for a kinder, gentler Martha Stewart Living. Not only does the Problem Have a Name, it has its own line of Fiestaware!

And what are our fallen M.B.A. sisters of Crimson doing? Kvells one Harvard-grad-turned-stay-at-home-mom, on the subject of her days:

I dance and sing and play the guitar and listen to NPR. I write letters to my family, my congressional representatives, and to newspaper editors. My kids and I play tag and catch, we paint, we explore, we climb trees and plant gardens together. We bike instead of using the car. We read, we talk, we laugh. Life is good. I never dust.

Is the mass media to blame (again!) for pushing women out of the workplace?

More here.

From National Book Critics Circle:

When Nora Ephron wrote her bitterly comic novel Heartburn and threw in a few recipes to sweeten the effect, she was devising a recipe for other authors to follow. Since then, novelists including Jan Karon, Laura Esquivel and Diane Mott Davidson have made food an essential ingredient of their books and included recipes for the avid reader. We can now, happily, add Lara Vapnyar to that list. And more important, we also can note that Vapnyar is one of the increasingly impressive roster of authors who have emigrated from Russia and other Eastern European countries and are now producing, in graceful and nuanced English that seems like their mother tongue, some of our finest contemporary literary fiction.

In Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, she captures, with exquisite description and delicately irony, the loneliness of the outsider, grateful to be living here, yet longing to feel at home. Vapnyar, who emigrated from Russia in 1994 knowing only a little English, now lives on Staten Island. She has also written the novel Memoirs of a Muse and There are Jews in my House, a story collection, as is Broccoli. Food is a central element in these tales. In the opener, “A Bunch of Broccoli on the Third Shelf,” Nina, an immigrant and “a computer programmer, like everybody else,” who considers herself plain and clumsy, reads cookbooks as if they were porn and buys vegetables by the armload, but never quite gets around to cooking them for her handsome husband. This is a story of emptiness amidst abundance, and it takes another immigrant — also plain, also lonely, but kind — to lift Nina up, literally and figuratively, into joy.

More here.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson on Ma Jian’s new novel, Beijing Coma:

Beijing Coma is no simple document of an astonishing event in human history. Subtle and didactic at once, it manages to join these opposing qualities without a visible seam. Characters declaim on recent Chinese history, then comment on why there is need to do so, in lessons that manage to directly educate the reader and illuminate the fictional character. Here is some sort of literary magic. That we know the outcome is actually something we forget as we read, another neat trick perpetrated by an author who is both crafty and passionate: once we come to know these individuals, down to the smell of their shoes and the shape of their toes, the final stupendously crashing scene of pandemonium (as it echoes later in the solitude of poor Dai Wei’s thoughts) is as shocking as it could possibly be, short of our having been there.

Ma Jian, as always, has bigger points to make (not to mention art with great emotional range). He does so by way of what looks like a bit of fun. Take the factions that grow like fungus in the damp medium of the encampment, the factions that he intimates are a congenital problem for the Chinese people: in one two-page span he enumerates the Dare-to-Die Squad, Hunger Strike Headquarters, the Beijing Students’ Federation, the Provincial Students’ Federation, the Workers’ Federation and a troop called the Wolves of the North-West. In a case of “like father, like son,” the students cannot get their march to the square under way until they have engaged in competitive slogan-crafting and painted the results onto banners, an endeavor that provokes ridiculous infighting. These young people are as prone to palace coups and militaristic overthrows as the oppressors they end up pelting with rocks and words. Ma has Dai Wei observe, “The vastness of the Square seemed to have inflated everyone’s egos”; of another compatriot, Dai complains, “With his constant strategising, Yang Tao was living up to his reputation as a modern-day General Zhu Geliang.”

If you’ve ever squirmed through a concert of what a composer I know calls “crunch-and-thump music,” you’ll likely feel a twinge of sympathy when you read “Admit It, You’re as Bored as I Am,” the slash-and-burn attack on contemporary classical music that Joe Queenan published last week in the Guardian (http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/ story /0,,2289751,00.html). Mr. Queenan, a music-loving humorist known for his disinclination to suffer fools, has finally decided to admit, both to himself and to the public at large, that he doesn’t like modern music — any kind of modern music, so far as I can gather from his piece, which is a bit on the unspecific side. Still, it isn’t hard to catch Mr. Queenan’s drift from his description of “The Minotaur,” a new opera by Harrison Birtwistle, which he calls “harsh and ugly and monotonous and generically apocalyptic. . . the same funereal caterwauling that bourgeoisie-loathing composers have been churning out since the 1930s.”

more from the WSJ here.

This is a spellbinding book, though it is not really about Vermeer. Timothy Brook is a professor of Chinese, and his subject is Dutch trade with China in the 17th century. Starting from details in five of Vermeer’s paintings, he takes readers on a series of brilliantly circuitous mystery tours that reveal the savagery on which western civilisation was built. The hat of his title is the wide-brimmed, high-crowned fashion item worn by the officer in Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl. To make a hat like that you must have stiff felt, manufactured from beaver pelts. By the start of the 17th century, European and Scandinavian beavers had been driven to extinction by the demands of the hatting industry, so a new source was needed. Brook’s first set piece is a battle in 1609 on the shore of one of the Great Lakes between a band of French explorers and an army of Mohawk warriors. Armed with arquebuses, the French rapidly gunned down the Mohawks, and this display of firepower persuaded the remaining tribesmen to provide a regular supply of North American beavers for European hats. It also marked the start of the destruction of North American native culture.

The French, though, were not really looking for beavers. They were looking for China.

more from the Sunday Times here.

Jay Parini in The Australian:

One does not hope for poetry to change the world. W.H. Auden noted when he wrote in his elegy for W.B. Yeats that “poetry makes nothing happen”. That is, it doesn’t shift the stock market or persuade dictators to stand down. It doesn’t usually send masses into the streets to protest against a war or petition for economic justice. It works in quieter ways, shaping the interior space of readers, adding a range of subtlety to their thoughts, complicating the world for them.

Language defines us as human beings. We speak, therefore we exist. We have the miraculous ability to gesture in words, to make statements and requests, to express our feelings, to construct arguments, to draw conclusions. Poetic language matters because it is precise and concrete, and draws us closer to the material world. In Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson argues that the sheer physicality of words points us in directions that might be called spiritual. He puts forward three principles worth considering:

Words are signs of natural facts.
Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.
Nature is the symbol of the spirit.

Those statements formed a platform of sorts for the transcendental movement, which studied nature closely for signs of spiritual life. The principles remain worthy of reflection. At some level, words suggest natural facts: rock, river, bird, cloud. The leap comes in the second statement, which posits a spiritual world. One can, I think, leap beyond conventional notions of spirituality here and acknowledge a deep interior world wherein each of us lives, no matter what our religious persuasion.

To call James Wood the finest literary critic writing in English today, as is commonplace, is to treat him like some sort of fancy terrier at Westminster. It both exaggerates and diminishes his importance. It exaggerates in its specious assignment of rank, an insult to Frank Kermode, Daniel Mendelsohn, Helen Vendler, Louis Menand and other fine critics. It diminishes insofar as its trophy is a consolation prize for being not only a dog but an ornamental one.

It would be better to say simply that Wood is among the very few contemporary writers of great consequence. There is, nevertheless, something to the desire to claim Wood’s incomparability. Not many people I know, upon returning home to find a new issue of the New York Review of Books, speed it open to discover without delay how Kermode has taken to the new Ezra Pound biography. But there is vast anecdotal evidence of subscribers to the New Yorker and the London Review of Books reading Wood’s essays huddled in entryways, coats and keys and umbrellas still in their hands. He has earned a rare and awesome cultural authority.

more from the LA Times here.

Richard Dawkins’ interviews with Steven Weinberg, Lawrence Krauss, PZ Myers, and Richard Buss can be seen here. A segment of the interview with Weinberg:

///

“The wasichu (white man) came like locusts from the east with promises not to devour our future.  But not one promise was fulfilled.  The destiny of the wasichu was to count coup on, then to kill and scalp our destiny.” –Sees Nothing New, a shaman of the Plains Indians

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.
…………………………………

///

      

William Grimes in the New York Times Book Review:

In “Stop Me if You’ve Heard This,” his wispy inquiry into the history and philosophy of jokes, Jim Holt offers up a choice one from ancient times. Talkative barber to customer: “How shall I cut your hair?” Customer: “In silence.”

Bada-bing.

This knee-slapper comes from “Philogelos,” or “Laughter-Lover,” a Greek joke book, probably compiled in the fourth or fifth century A.D. Its 264 entries amount to an index of classical humor, with can’t-miss material on such figures of fun as the miser, the drunk, the sex-starved woman and the man with bad breath.

Let us not forget the “skolastikos,” or egghead: “An egghead was on a sea voyage when a big storm blew up, causing his slaves to weep in terror. ‘Don’t cry,’ he consoled them, ‘I have freed you all in my will.’”

Bada-boom.

Holt, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, combs through a number of obscure texts, ancient and modern, in his fast-moving, idiosyncratic survey of humor and its vagaries through the ages.

More here.

Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times Magazine:

Louise Brown turns 30 on Friday. These days, her name elicits little more than a mystified head shake. Who was she again? Let me refresh your memory: Little Louise was the world’s first “test-tube baby,” what we now refer to as an I.V.F. kid, or simply “the twins down the block.”

Brown’s life today is as unremarkable as the circumstances of her conception have become: she’s worked as an administrative assistant in Bristol, England, and is married with a naturally conceived toddler of her own. It’s hard to imagine that she begat one of the major revolutions of the 20th century: since her debut, more than three million babies have been born worldwide using I.V.F. or other reproductive technologies.

The dire, Henny Penny predictions that accompanied the Brown’s blessed event now seem quaint. An editorial in this newspaper observed that “probably not since the invention of nuclear weapons has a scientific advance been received with such mixed feelings.” Elsewhere, I.V.F. was decried as a “violation of God’s plan.” Conservative ethicists warned that the technology would ultimately create freakishly malformed babies or, equally monstrous, designer children genetically engineered to be stronger and smarter than the rest.

More here.

More here from Newsweek.

Yoni Brenner in The New Yorker:

1. Top thick slices of country bread with fresh goat cheese. Sprinkle with herbs and bake until crusty; serve to everyone but Jeff.

2. Vegetarian friends? Try veggie rumaki: wrap a strip of imitation bacon around a water chestnut, spear with a toothpick, and broil—but instead of imitation bacon use real bacon, and instead of a water chestnut use veal.

3. Steal Cheryl’s famous potato-salad recipe. When Cheryl asks, “Why did you steal my recipe?,” say, “I don’t know, Cheryl, why did you break my heart?” Then laugh so she knows you’re just kidding.

4. Blend fresh crabmeat with diced avocado, scallions, and a dollop of mayonnaise for a canapé topping so delicious that it will take your guests a full minute to realize that they’re eating it off dog biscuits. Once they catch on, act mortified and stammer that you must have “mixed up the boxes,” until everyone calms down. Then start crying because the biscuits remind you that today marks exactly eight weeks since you had to put down Buster, and you just miss him so much.

5. Tell Marissa that you appreciate her concern, but in the two years since Cheryl broke off the engagement you’ve grown up a lot, and you’re really in a much healthier place now. Then say, “Speaking of fiancés, how’s Peter’s alcoholism?” (Note: This is not technically an appetizer.)

More here.

Elias Khoury in the Boston Review:

On February 14, 1948, during the 1948 War—called the War of Independence by Israelis, and the Catastrophe (Nakba) by the Palestinians—the Palestinian village Sa’sa’ was invaded by the Palmach, the elite unit of the Haganah, precursor to the Israel Defense Forces. The villagers did not resist, but thirty-five houses were destroyed and 60-80 people were killed.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé describes the incident in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, drawing on a report by the commander of the battalion responsible for the attack. Pappé—along with Benny Morris, Simha Flapan, Avi Shlaim, and others—is a member of the group of “new historians” who have, since the ’80s, devoted their energies to reexamining their country’s founding myths and thus enlarged the space for critical discussion within Israel about the Palestinian tragedy. According to the report, a village guard in Sa’sa’ found himself caught in a verbal crossfire. Instead of asking, “Who is there?” (min hada) when the soldiers approached, he asked, “What is this?” (iesh hada). An Israeli soldier who happened to know Arabic replied, inverting the two words, “Hada iesh.” His use of “iesh” was not the Arabic, however, but the Hebrew in which it means “fire.” Thus mixing the two languages, he replied “this is fire,” before killing the astonished Palestinian.

The deadly reply was a mirror of the question, and the ways in which the response was understood and misunderstood—a mixture of knowledge and ignorance, real bloodshed and imaginary projections—reflect the intricate interdependence of identity that comes into play in both Palestinian and Israeli literatures.

More here.

More here from National Geographic. 

Amanda Gefter reviews the book, edited by Sean Miller and Shveta Verma, in New Scientist:

What first drew me to physics were the words. Cosmos. Entanglement. Spiralling galaxies and stars gone supernova, dark matter and charmed quarks. Physics brims with linguistic magic. And once you peer beneath the words, you find ideas can possess a poetry more poignant than any turn of phrase. String theory may turn out to be wrong. It might not be testable and it might not describe the real world. But it does describe a world that’s undeniably poetic.

Still, I’ll admit, when I picked up Riffing on Strings I was sceptical. Sure, the poetic building blocks are there, but creative writing and string theory? It’s got the potential to go horribly awry. So I was pleased to find such an eclectic, thought-provoking and entertaining collection of writing – perfect for toting along on travels in other dimensions. The book opens with Sean Miller’s introduction to string theory and its place in the arts, followed by a series of essays by acclaimed physicists. Michio Kaku’s piece on duality is especially informative. Then come short stories, poems and plays that show the myriad ways in which physics seeps into public consciousness, is absorbed by the artist and re-emitted as something entirely new. These are pieces inspired by string theory, not about it. It’s not a matter of whether the writers get the science right, it’s how they play with it.

Read more »

Lynne Duke in Root:

Who would ever have imagined the scene when South Africa won the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and Mandela strode onto the field at Ellis Park Stadium wearing the jersey of the team captain. In a spectacularly powerful moment of symbolism, the throng of Afrikaners chanted, “Nelson! Nelson! Nelson!”—though Afrikaners at that time weren’t fully embracing black rule and often wouldn’t even sing the new national anthem.

Yes, Mandela would forgive. But he would not forget. His political agenda was crafted as corrective for all the damage the Afrikaners had done under apartheid. He had to transform an economy that had once served only whites; uplift the black poor; rewrite the legal canon; bring some human rights to a people who had for so long been denied. And the truth commission, under Archbishop Desmond Tutu, would tend to the healing, the forgiveness. He was often called the “father of the nation,” though he rejected the notion that he was a kind of messiah. But in the townships and shanties, where life was bitter but dreams were sustenance, people revered him and hung on his every word. So many times, ordinary people would tell me, sometimes using Mandela’s affectionate clan name: Madiba says we must forgive, so I must try.

More here.