From Science:

Contagious cancer has been sweeping through populations of Tasmanian devils, killing most of the adults. Now, young devils are breeding earlier than ever before. But is this a case of rapid evolution or just a fleeting response to a changing environment?

Tasmanian devil facial tumor disease surfaced in Tasmania about 10 years ago and now affects the majority of devils on the island. Lesions around the animal’s mouth can grow as large as Ping-Pong balls and spread over the face; unable to eat, the devils die of starvation within months of the cancer’s appearance. The disease is highly contagious, and adults are particularly susceptible, possibly because the tumor cells are often spread during sexual contact. The problem has proved so devastating that Tasmanian devils were declared an endangered species in May.

Zoologist Menna Jones of the University of Tasmania has also noticed a sharp increase in pregnancies among 1-year-old devils. Normally, the animals, which live about 6 years, don’t breed before age 2. But when Jones and colleagues gauged the age and reproductive status of devils–via tooth erosion and sex organ development–they found evidence for breeding several months to a year earlier than normal at four out of five sites studied. The proportion of early breeding females reached a surprising 83% at one location, the team reports this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The shift toward early breeding could be an evolutionary response, says Jones. By killing any adults that breed after age 2, the cancer could be genetically selecting for younger breeding females, she notes. If so, the findings would make the devil the first known mammal to rapidly evolve its reproductive patterns in response to a disease.

More here.

Report from Kosovo

Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books:

‘Humanitarian intervention’ has little to show for its brief appearance on the international stage. It arrived too late for Rwanda, gestured helplessly at Bosnia and, at last, in 2003, it was discovered in the arms of Shock and Awe, where it died of shame. Only Kosovo Albanians, about 1.8 million people, still applaud the violent expulsion of Slobodan Milosevic from their province in 1999. However they are less sure about the legacy of intervention and the advantages of being a United Nations protectorate.

If intervention was supposed to bring about development, which optimists see as a prelude to civility, it has not been a success. The most startling features of Kosovo, now that the cleansing of the Serbian minority is on hold, are the poverty of the province – for Albanians and Serbs alike – and the pitiful economy that keeps it locked in. Despite the creation of a small millionaire class, 45 per cent of its inhabitants are below the poverty level (unable to meet basic needs). Around 15 per cent live in extreme poverty, earning less than a euro a day. Most of Kosovo’s poor are supported by networks of extended family and clan, more important by far than the structures of organised politics or religion: a majority of Albanians in Kosovo are Sunni Muslims, only loosely observant, and a small Catholic minority is on the rise. In the absence of public provision or private sector wealth creation, it’s the cousins who count.

More here.

Nicholas Wade in The New York Times:

Ants are Dr. Wilson’s first and enduring love. But he has become one of the world’s best-known biologists through two other passions, his urge to create large syntheses of knowledge and his gift for writing. Through the power of his words, he champions the world’s biodiversity and regularly campaigns for conservation measures.

Though he celebrated his 79th birthday last month, Dr. Wilson is generating a storm of literary output that would be impressive for someone half his age. An updated edition of “The Superorganism,” his encyclopedic work on ants co-written with Bert Hölldobler, will be published in November. Dr. Wilson is at work on his first novel. He is preparing a treatise on the forces of social evolution, which seems likely to apply to people the lessons evident in ant colonies. And he is engaged in another fight.

Beneath his gentle manner and Southern charm, Dr. Wilson is a scrapper. He grew up in Alabama and Florida, where the local custom with respect to fistfights was that one could prevail or get knocked out, with no third option. “I never picked a fight,” he wrote in “Naturalist,” his autobiography. “But once started I never quit, even when losing, until the other boy gave up or an adult mercifully pulled us apart.”

More here. (Note: Being a diehard myrmecophile and a great admirer of Dr. Wilson, I can safely say that his Pulitzer Prize winning book on ants is one of the best things I have ever read since it radically changed my view of life in general and cancer in particular).

Dmitri Tymoczko in Seed Magazine:

For a thousand years, Western musicians have endeavored to satisfy two fundamental constraints in their compositions. The first is that melodies should, in general, move by short distances. When played on a piano, melodies typically move to nearby keys rather than take large jumps across the keyboard. The second is that music should use chords (collections of simultaneously sounded notes) that are audibly similar. Rather than leap willy-nilly between completely unrelated sonorities, musicians typically restrict themselves to small portions of the musical universe, for instance by using only major and minor chords. While the melodic constraint is nearly universal, the harmonic constraint is more particularly Western: Many non-Western styles either reject chords altogether, using only one note at a time or build entire pieces around a single unchanging harmony.

Together these constraints ensure a two-dimensional coherence in Western music analogous to that of a woven cloth. Music is a collection of simultaneously occurring melodies, parallel horizontal threads that are held together tightly by short-distance motion. But Western music also has a vertical, or harmonic, coherence. If we consider only the notes sounding at any one instant, we find that they form familiar chords related to those that sound at other instants of time. These basic requirements impose nontrivial constraints on composers–not just any sequence of chords we imagine can generate a collection of short-distance melodies. We might therefore ask, how do we combine harmony and melody to make music? In other words, what makes music sound good?

More here.

Emily V. Driscoll in Scientific American:

Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male.

Robert Gramzay, a keeper at the zoo, watched the chinstrap penguin pair roll a rock into their nest and sit on it, according to newspaper reports. Gramzay found an egg from another pair of penguins that was having difficulty hatching it and slipped it into Roy and Silo’s nest. Roy and Silo took turns warming the egg with their blubbery underbellies until, after 34 days, a female chick pecked her way into the world. Roy and Silo kept the gray, fuzzy chick warm and regurgitated food into her tiny black beak.

Like most animal species, penguins tend to pair with the opposite sex, for the obvious reason. But researchers are finding that same-sex couplings are surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Roy and Silo belong to one of as many as 1,500 species of wild and captive animals that have been observed engaging in homosexual activity.

More here.

Liang Shaoji. Nature Series No 102. 2004.

In a large warehouse space in Shanghai, 31 miners’ helmets rest symmetrically arrayed on a concrete floor, illuminated solely by the light of their own headlamps, and swathed in a web-like film of raw silk. The filtered industrial glow exudes pensive melancholy, a difficult feat to achieve in the midst of one of the world’s fastest growing metropolises.

More here, and here.

Deanna Isaacs in the Chicago Reader:

The latest Chicago stage production to head for New York hasn’t exactly been high profile at home. Though it’s had three runs here over the last two years, Theater Oobleck’s The Strangerer managed to fly under the radar of the lead critics at the local mainstream papers. Playwright Mickle Maher says the dailies’ big guns never made it to the show, which leaves it nicely positioned as an “underground” hit. That’s always sexy.

And the critics who did make it pretty much raved their heads off, with words like “brilliant” and “hilarious” leaping from their keyboards. Still, when The Strangerer opens July 13 at the Barrow Street Theatre in lower Manhattan, it may face a little marketing challenge. The play’s an odd duck: a take on the Albert Camus novel The Stranger (last read by most of us in high school) wedded to a fictionalized presidential campaign debate—minus the current candidates. In The Strangerer, it’s 2004 and George Bush is facing John Kerry while Jim Lehrer moderates. When I posted news of the New York gig to the Reader’s Onstage blog, a commenter was moved to remark that the idea “just doesn’t seem timely.”

More here.  [Thanks to Bryon Giddens-White.] NYC performance info here.

Woe to the musician who can actually play his or her instrument. In that direction ridicule lies. Ridicule by reason of excessively long solos, of leaden grooves, of unpleasant facial posturing so as to simulate profundity.

In this regard: consider the plight of Gentle Giant. They are among the most reviled of prog-rock outfits from the ’70s. They made concept albums; they were heavily influenced (or so it was said) by the French Renaissance writer Rabelais; they were all capable of playing recorders; and, after the advent of punk, they tried to sell out and make New Wave albums. If all that were not bad enough, they started life as a soul band (Simon Dupree and the Big Sound), electing to go prog in 1969.

It would seem impossible to defend Gentle Giant, and yet that is what I mean to do.

more from The Believer here.

Marie-Thérèse de Bourbon, the daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, is one of the most tragic characters in modern history. Orphaned by the French revolution and released only after three years of harsh imprisonment, she remains an icon for French royalists to this day. After the Bourbon restoration in 1814, she became the leading female figure at court for almost 20 years, exercising considerable political power. Yet no adequate biography of her exists in French, let alone in English.

No reading of the story of Marie-Thérèse’s early sufferings can fail to shock. By the age of 17, she had witnessed brutal mob violence, her father, mother and aunt had gone to the guillotine, and her 10-year-old brother had died in prison of malnutrition and tuberculosis, in a cell littered with his own excrement. To add to her psychological torment, nobody bothered to inform her that her mother was dead for almost two years. Eventually released from captivity in December 1795, she was reunited with the remnants of her family in Russia, marrying her cousin, the duc d’Angouleme, in 1799.

more from The Sunday Times here.

He’s drunk, he’s high, he’s mournful, he’s masochistic and he makes great art. It could be a lot of painters throughout art history and now, according to HBO, which is premiering director Jeff Stimmel’s 63-minute-long documentary The Art of Failure, it’s Chuck Connelly. What this film unintentionally reveals is that, contrary to cliché, Connelly is not an oil-based genius because he is psychotically living through constant pain; he is in pain precisely because making arresting images in paint is so easy for him. When Chuck is out of the studio, everything else is difficult.

In rather conventional “art brut” passages, we see Chuck alienate his wife, hire a doppelganger to pretend he is Chuck, fill his living room with his naked lesbian series, smoke joints, visit Warhol’s grave, and generally act out like a vicious Chucklehead. Intermittently, Connelly grins with idiotic sweetness. Then, mirabile dictu, we see Chuck turn out a toadlike green self-portrait, a masterpiece, in 50 seconds, with sympathetic play-by-play commentary from Artnet Magazine’s own Walter Robinson.

more from Artnet here.

Todd Ackerman and Eric Berger in the Houston Chronicle:

Dr. Sherwin Nuland, medicine’s best-known historian, was visiting with Dr. Michael DeBakey three years ago when the then-96-year-old surgeon left the room to attend to some business.

Taking advantage of the moment to tour the room’s extensive collection of memorabilia — the honors, photographs and mementos from an illustrative career that spanned eight decades — Nuland stopped to reflect on two antiquarian charts of the history of medicine.

“As I studied the charts, it occurred to me that no face on them was any more important in the history of medicine than DeBakey himself,” said Nuland, a retired surgeon at the Yale University School of Medicine and author of Doctors: The Biography of Medicine. “I can’t think of anyone who’s made more of a contribution to the field of medicine.”

Michael Ellis DeBakey — internationally acclaimed as the father of modern cardiovascular surgery and considered by many to be the greatest surgeon ever — died Friday night at The Methodist Hospital in Houston. He was 99.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul. And Bhaisaheb, did you know him?]

From The New York Times:

Max retrieves Frisbees. He gobbles jelly beans. He chases deer. He is — and this should be remembered when discussions of cases like his blunder into the thickets of cognitive ethology, normative psychology and intraspecies solipsism — a good dog. A 3-year-old German shepherd, all rangy limbs and skittering paws, he patrols the hardwood floors and wall-to-wall carpets of a cul-de-sac home in Lafayette, Calif., living with Michelle Spring, a nurse, and her husband, Allan, a retired airline pilot. Max fields tennis balls with his dexterous forelegs and can stand on his hindquarters to open the front door. He loves car rides and will leap inside any available auto, even ones belonging to strangers. Housebroken, he did slip up once indoors, but everybody knows that the Turducken Incident simply wasn’t his fault. “He’s agile,” Allan says. “He’s healthy. He’s a good-looking animal.” Michelle adds, “We love him to death.” That is why they had no choice, she says. The dog simply had to go on psychoactive drugs.

More here.

///

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends  
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

......--William Carlos Williams 

.........................................
This is Just To Say

I have eaten 
the plums 
that were 
in the icebox

and which
you were probably 
saving
for breakfast

forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

......--William Carlos Williams 

 Apology

Forgive me
for backing over
and smashing
your red wheelbarrow.

............................

It was raining
and the rear wiper
does not work on
my new plum-colored SUV.
................................
I am also sorry
about the white
chickens.

.................................
......--F.J. Bergman

Arifa Akbar in The Independent:

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children has been fêted by the literary world for nearly three decades. Yesterday the public showed their appreciation, voting it the greatest Booker Prize winner of them all.

The novel was selected from a long-list of 41 previous Booker winners, and had been the bookies’ favourite on a shortlist of six nominated to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the prize.

Announcing the winner, Victoria Glendinning, the chairman of the judging panel that picked the shortlist, urged the organisers to allow the public to choose the Booker winner every year. This, she said, would encourage people to read more.

It is the third Booker Midnight’s Children has picked up since it first won the award in 1981, having also been judged the Booker of Bookers for the award’s 25th anniversary.

More here.

The father of the conservation movement found his calling on a visit to the California wilderness.

Tony Perrottet in Smithsonian Magazine:

The naturalist John Muir is so closely associated with Yosemite National Park—after all, he helped draw up its proposed boundaries in 1889, wrote the magazine articles that led to its creation in 1890 and co-founded the Sierra Club in 1892 to protect it—that you’d think his first shelter there would be well marked. But only park historians and a few Muir devotees even know where the little log cabin was, just yards from the Yosemite Falls Trail. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, for here one can experience the Yosemite that inspired Muir. The crisp summer morning that I was guided to the site, the mountain air was perfumed with ponderosa and cedar; jays, larks and ground squirrels gamboled about. And every turn offered picture-postcard views of the valley’s soaring granite cliffs, so majestic that early visitors compared them to the walls of Gothic cathedrals. No wonder many 19th-century travelers who visited Yosemite saw it as a new Eden.

More here.  [This post is dedicated to my friend Tamuira Reid, who happens to be John Muir’s grand-daughter.]

Via Andrew Sullivan:

Douglas Rushkoff in Edge:

This focus on the individual, and its false equation with democracy, began back in the Renaissance. The Renaissance brought us wonderful innovations, such as perspective painting, scientific observation, and the printing press. But each of these innovations defined and celebrated individuality. Perspective painting celebrates the perspective of an individual on a scene. Scientific method showed how the real observations of an individual promote rational thought. The printing press gave individuals the opportunity to read, alone, and cogitate. Individuals formed perspectives, made observations, and formed opinions.

The individual we think of today was actually born in the Renaissance. The Vesuvian Man, Da Vinci’s great drawing of a man in a perfect square and circle—independent and self-sufficient. This is the Renaissance ideal.

It was the birth of this thinking, individuated person that led to the ethos underlying the Enlightenment. Once we understood ourselves as individuals, we understood ourselves as having rights. The Rights of Man. A right to property. The right to personal freedom.

The next renaissance (if there is one)—the phenomenon we’re talking about or at least around here is not about the individual at all, but about the networked group. The possibility for collective action. The technologies we’re using—the biases of these media—cede central authority to decentralized groups. Instead of moving power to the center, they tend to move power to the edges. Instead of creating value from the center—like a centrally issued currency—the network creates value from the periphery. 

More here.

The odds that a potentially devastating space rock will hit Earth this century may be as high as one in 10. So why isn’t NASA trying harder to prevent catastrophe?

Gregg Easterbrooke in The Atlantic:

Breakthrough ideas have a way of seeming obvious in retro­spect, and about a decade ago, a Columbia University geophysicist named Dallas Abbott had a breakthrough idea. She had been pondering the craters left by comets and asteroids that smashed into Earth. Geologists had counted them and concluded that space strikes are rare events and had occurred mainly during the era of primordial mists. But, Abbott realized, this deduction was based on the number of craters found on land—and because 70 percent of Earth’s surface is water, wouldn’t most space objects hit the sea? So she began searching for underwater craters caused by impacts rather than by other forces, such as volcanoes. What she has found is spine-chilling: evidence that several enormous asteroids or comets have slammed into our planet quite recently, in geologic terms. If Abbott is right, then you may be here today, reading this magazine, only because by sheer chance those objects struck the ocean rather than land.

Abbott believes that a space object about 300 meters in diameter hit the Gulf of Carpentaria, north of Australia, in 536 A.D. An object that size, striking at up to 50,000 miles per hour, could release as much energy as 1,000 nuclear bombs.

More here.

The Greeks worshipped it; the Aztecs were a little more conflicted.

Sam Anderson in New York magazine:

The popular history of a humdrum object—that faddish genre in which the most boring items on your dining-room table (salt, cod, potatoes, bananas, chocolate) are revealed to be secret juggernauts of profound social change—has recently become so popular that it’s probably time for someone to write a popular history of it. If I were forced, I’d diagnose the trend as yet another symptom (like $4 gas or home foreclosures) of our current flavor of late-phase capitalism—a commercialism so far advanced we’ve begun transferring historical glories from our leaders (Napoleon, Churchill, Gandhi) to our products, so that we find ourselves surrounded by greatness in every aisle of Whole Foods. I’d also add, if forced, that the genre’s wild success seems to predict its own obsolescence: The conclusion that everything is integral to the history of everything is perilously close, in the end, to no conclusion at all.

True to form, Iain Gately’s new book, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, posits its subject as the lifeblood of the world. Booze has presided over executions and business deals and marriages and births. It inspired the ancient Greeks to invent not only democracy but comedy and tragedy. It helped goad America’s Founding Fathers into revolution.

More here.

Gérard Gavarry’s work is one of contemporary French literature’s best-kept secrets. That this should be so here in the United States is no surprise, granted that his books have not yet found their way into English translation—though Dalkey Archive Press will soon remedy that, with translations of Hop là! un deux trois and Façon d’un roman. The fact that Gavarry is not more broadly known in France is more perplexing, however, for the kind of writing that he has practiced for the last twenty-five years or so is bold, original, and innovative. It is as richly deserving of attention as that of any of Gavarry’s contemporaries, yet it has not appealed to a general readership, nor has it received its share of critical ink. One of the reasons for this may lie in what I feel to be Gavarry’s cardinal virtue: his writerly mobility. Reading through his work, it shortly becomes clear that he is unwilling to tread upon ground that he has already traversed, and that he is committed to producing books that come to us anew, each one deploying different narrative strategies and putting a variety of questions on the table for our consideration. The diversity of theme and approach in his books is most invigorating indeed, but it also makes them hard to categorize according to the conventional taxonomies that many critics (and indeed many general readers) rely upon in order to make their way through contemporary literature.

more from Context here.