Steve Coll in The New Yorker:

The question of whether Osama bin Laden has ever visited the United States, a subject on which I have expended an unhealthy amount of energy in the course of various journalistic and biographical research, has now seemingly been settled. Osama was here for two weeks in 1979, it seems, and he visited Indiana and Los Angeles, among other places. He had a favorable encounter with an American medical doctor; he also reportedly met in Los Angeles with his spiritual mentor of the time, the Palestinian radical Abdullah Azzam. All this is according to a forthcoming book by Osama’s first wife, Najwa Bin Laden, and his son Omar Bin Laden, to be published in the autumn by St. Martin’s Press.

First, some context for the book’s disclosures:

In the autumn of 2005, while conducting research in Saudi Arabia for the book that became “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” I met a Saudi journalist named Khaled Batarfi, who had been a neighbor and friend of Osama Bin Laden in their teenage years. During one of our interviews, Batarfi offered an account of Osama’s early travels—to London, to Africa on Safari, and to the United States—that was suggestive of a young man who had more direct experience of the West than was generally understood.

More here.

Maelstrom, Roxy Paine’s magnificently intricate installation currently on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is to date the most prominent offspring of a rapidly evolving typology, lifesize tree golems rendered in stainless steel. Paine manages to steer these leafless “Dendroids,” as he calls them, between the Scylla of transparency and the Charibdis of mechanization, unyielding hazards to authorship of his own contrarian devising established by two other families of sculpture. On one side are Paine’s “Replicants,” portraits of notorious, untrustworthy plants and fungi fixed in eternal plastic with an exegetical fidelity to surpass the craftsmanship of the best diorama and Hollywood prop technicians. Here the hand dissolves like the Cheshire Cat around the grin of its expertise. But looming off to starboard are the industrial prototypes that have been tuned to glop, dip, carve, or spray potentially numberless unique artworks, induced but not touched by the artist. Most disconcerting about these machines is how undeniably ravishing are the objects they produce. The minimalist stalactites of Paint Dipper, the scholar’s canyons of Erosion Machine, and the impeccably grotesque, groovy meltdowns of SCUMAK, for example, flout the prerogatives of painting and sculpture not merely with sly, assembly-line standardization but in manifesting a literal and figurative gravity to die for.

more from David Brody at artcritical here.

From The Telegraph:

Like some deeply bruised cloud hovering thunderously above a summer picnic, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness threatens us still, more than a century since its publication.

Few works have entertained, excited and troubled minds as much. It has inspired music – including a forthcoming opera by Tarik O’Regan – and spawned numerous radio, theatre, film and television adaptations, the most famous being Apocalypse Now. TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men did more for the work’s projection towards a readership, quoting the phrase: “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.” It infused Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist and haunts both John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener and The Mission Song. VS Naipaul and Graham Greene were swept up by it, as were Nick Davies in writing Dark Heart along with Sven Lindquist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, Michaela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, and Tim Butcher’s Blood River. This weekend, at the Festival Hall in London, there will be two five-hour readings of the book, complete with piano accompaniment.

What is it about Heart of Darkness that has this horrid hold on our consciousness?

More here.

Mark Trodden in Cosmic Variance:

One of the more fun physics stories that I’ve seen recently is from an area of research quite removed from my own, but that I have found fascinating for a while now. I have been fortunate to have excellent condensed matter colleagues at both my recent institutions, and quite a number of them are interested in soft condensed matter – classical physics that describes the behavior of large numbers of particles, far from equilibrium, often when entropic considerations dominate the dynamics.

The field covers such diverse systems as the behavior of biological membranes and the dynamics of grain in silos, and contains many examples in which nontrivial geometry and topology lead to the possibility of discovering new phenomena that, unlike in my own field, can increasingly often be checked in a laboratory experiment designed and built in a relatively short time.

The story that caught my eye (via Wired Science) recently concerns the behavior of a system that is so simple that you would think we know all that there is to be known about it – falling sand.

In the video above, a stream of sand is allowed to fall over several feet, and is filmed using a high speed video camera that falls at the same speed as the sand. The result, as you can see, is that the sand forms “droplets” just as water would, even though most people would not think of granular materials as anything like a liquid.

More here.

From Nonrhotic:

In what can best be described as mildly coherent rambling, Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska, announced her resignation on July 3. During her speech, she alluded to a combination of factors that lead to her decision. Reading through the full text of her speech, I was able to extract 11 reasons that were buried deep amidst her wandering prose and tangled logic. They are paraphrased below (along with the relevant text from her speech in italics):

1. Defending myself against claims of ethics violations by political operatives is distracting me from doing my job as governor. Therefore, I resign.
“Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I’ve been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations … Every one – all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We’ve won! But it hasn’t been cheap – the State has wasted THOUSANDS of hours of YOUR time and shelled out some two million of YOUR dollars to respond to “opposition research” – that’s money NOT going to fund teachers or troopers – or safer roads.

2. Life is short. Time is too precious to waste. I am wasting my time as governor. Therefore, I resign to make better use of my time.
“Life is too short to compromise time and resources… Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time… to BUILD UP.”

3. I am expected to serve out the term I was elected for. But that would make me a quitter. Therefore, I am quitting because I don’t want to be a quitter.
“… it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: “Sit down and shut up”, but that’s the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and “go with the flow. Nah, only dead fish “go with the flow”.”

More here.

Our own PD Smith in the Times Literary Supplement:

Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick (1851) is Philip Hoare’s guiding star in this beautifully written celebration of cetaceans, a word that comes from the Greek word ketos, sea monster. He glosses Melville’s fiction as a meditation on “man, whale, life, death”. Hoare’s book, like Moby-Dick, is on one level a rich source of information about these ancient mammals, from natural history to their role in our lives and myths. But Leviathan is also a deeply personal narrative that weaves together travelogue, memoir and literary history.

In Moby-Dick, Ishmael’s “splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world” and he seeks the solace of the sea. Disillusioned with city life, Hoare, who admits that he has “always been afraid of deep water”, also turns to the ocean – “the last true wilderness” – as an antidote to London, for the “place that had represented all my youthful aspirations now felt like a viral infection”. He follows in Ishmael’s wake, travelling from New York down to Cape Cod and New Bedford – aka the Whaling City, where he visits Father Mapple’s chapel – and then on to Nantucket. In the sea off Cape Cod, Hoare watches the whales: “I envied them the fact that they were always swimming; that they were always free”, and later visits Melville’s grave on “a bare Bronx hill”, where the writer lies next to his two sons who preceded him into the grave.

Even today, in the age of particle colliders and space exploration, we know precious little about some of the planet’s oldest inhabitants; as Hoare says, “cetaceans remain unfathomable.”

More here.

From Nature:

Human embryonic stem cells have been coaxed into forming sperm-like cells, researchers report today¹. The cells have some of the hallmarks of sperm — they can swim, for example — but require much more characterization before they can be embraced as an experimental model for the study of inherited diseases and infertility.

Meanwhile, the use of such cells to help infertile couples to have children remains a distant prospect; in several countries, including the UK, it would actually be illegal even if they were properly characterised. With approximately one in seven couples experiencing fertility problems, there is a strong push to develop a robust method for generating sperm and eggs for research. But researchers have struggled for years to produce reproductive cells from stem cells. The task is particularly difficult because it requires a complex form of cell division called meiosis, which reduces the number of chromosomes per cell by half.

More here.

David Robson in New Scientist:

Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.

In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of “self-organised criticality”. These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour – such as a swinging pendulum – and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

More here.

Martha Nussbaum in Dissent:

Before we approach the issue of same-sex marriage, we must define marriage. But marriage, it soon becomes evident, is no single thing. It is plural in both content and meaning. The institution of marriage houses and supports several distinct aspects of human life: sexual relations, friendship and companionship, love, conversation, procreation and child-rearing, mutual responsibility. Marriages can exist without each of these. (We have always granted marriage licenses to sterile people, people too old to have children, irresponsible people, and people incapable of love and friendship. Impotence, lack of interest in sex, and refusal to allow intercourse may count as grounds for divorce, but they don’t preclude marriage.) Marriages can exist even in cases where none of these is present, though such marriages are probably unhappy. Each of these important aspects of human life, in turn, can exist outside of marriage, and they can even exist all together outside of marriage, as is evident from the fact that many unmarried couples live lives of intimacy, friendship, and mutual responsibility, and have and raise children. Nonetheless, when people ask themselves what the content of marriage is, they typically think of this cluster of things.

More here.

Amos Barshad in New York Magazine:

Michael Jackson was mourned in ridiculous, over-the-top style this afternoon at a public funeral service more befitting of his legacy than his bigger fans would probably like to admit. Enjoy our slideshow of images from inside the Staples Center and of MJ remembrances from around the world.

More photos here.

Not until publication of his memoirs in 1995, two decades after the war ended, did McNamara publicly admit that it had always been a mistake. In The Fog of War, Errol Morris’ 2003 documentary about the former defense secretary, McNamara recited some of the lessons he learned in office, one of which was, as he put it, “Rationality will not save us”—a notion that the McNamara of 40 years earlier would have dismissed as absurd. Another lesson was that military power should never be used unilaterally. Until the end, he misremembered—some would say he lied about—certain aspects of his history. He claimed that he helped JFK work toward a peaceful solution to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when Kennedy’s secret White House tapes reveal that after the first few days he advocated attacking the Soviet missile sites, even at the risk of a broader war. He said that LBJ pushed him to escalate in Vietnam, when Johnson’s secret tapes reveal that the pushing went both ways. He once told me, when I interviewed him for a book about nuclear strategy (The Wizards of Armageddon, 1983), that he would never have approved the multiple-warhead missiles known as MIRVs—although declassified documents show that he signed off on the program from its inception. Someday someone will write a great biography of McNamara. It will be the story not only of his life but of the vast tangle of contradictions and cataclysms that marked America in the 20th century and beyond.

more from Fred Kaplan at Slate here.

A number of New York subway trains currently have posted in them an advertisement for a suspense novel (Brad Meltzer’s Book of Lies) said to be a combination of The Da Vinci Code and North by Northwest. We know about the huge success of the former, especially in its book shape, but it’s reassuring news that a 50-year-old film is still taken to be a household, or rolling stock word. But what about the combination? Meltzer’s novel will tell us how and if it works, but we could still be left puzzling over the intended meaning of the ad, the sign value of the two titles. The Da Vinci Code is pretty easy: murder story with roots in ancient times and entangled in religion. And North by Northwest? Witty, stylish thriller where a man can almost get killed in the middle of nowhere and later scramble about the face of Mount Rushmore? Film where the notion of real-life probability is not just abandoned but lampooned, Hitchcock’s finest attack on the very notion of cause and motive? ‘Here, you see’, he said to Truffaut, speaking about this movie, ‘the MacGuffin has been boiled down to its purest expression: nothing at all!’ He is saying that the espionage that drives the plot does just that: it drives the plot. We don’t have to know what the spies are after or what’s at stake, even if there is a flicker of a mention of the Cold War in the movie. Do the stolen secrets matter? In the world of actual espionage that would probably be a secret too, but in Hitchcock the answer is a revelation. Of course they matter, even in the entire absence of any content for them. They are the way the film pretends it’s about something.

more from Michael Wood at the LRB here.

THERE ARE PLENTY of people who cheat on their spouses, plenty of people who hire prostitutes. It’s hardly unheard of for an office to be plagued by a boss sending sexually explicit emails to underlings, even much younger ones, or for a man to solicit sex in a public restroom or to hire a male prostitute and then buy drugs from him. In other words, it’s not just public figures with careers built around denouncing moral turpitude – crusading prosecutors like Eliot Spitzer, evangelical leaders like Ted Haggard, socially conservative politicians like Mark Foley, David Vitter and Larry Craig – who end up confessing to those very acts. And yet, with the back-to-back revelations of marital infidelity by Nevada senator John Ensign and South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, two more cultural conservatives, the question once again arises: why is it that people who set themselves up as moral paragons seem to have the hardest time living up to their own standards?

more from Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe here.

Sameer Rahim in The Telegraph:

When I lived in Damascus, my fellow Arabic students were always spotting Khalid Mishal around town. I suspected they were mistaken. Mishal was one of the exiled leaders of Hamas. It was the summer of 2006 and the Palestinian militant group had just captured an Israeli soldier in a cross-border tunnelling raid. Israel had carried out assassinations in Damascus before and Mishal would now be top of their list. Added to this, as Paul McGeough relates in his biography of Mishal and history of Hamas, Israel was still smarting from the humiliation of Mossad’s failed attempt to kill Mishal nine years earlier. That September, two agents disguised as Canadian tourists entered the Jordanian capital armed with a specially designed camera, loaded with poison. When Mishal’s bodyguards dropped him outside his offices, one agent approached and knelt down in front of him – then rose suddenly and sprayed the liquid in Mishal’s ear. He and his accomplice tried to escape but the bodyguards gave chase and eventually surrendered them to Jordanian custody. Mishal, meanwhile, was starting to feel unwell. The poison was designed to slowly paralyse his nervous system, leading to death.

When King Hussein was told of the plot he was furious. Jordan had signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 and was its closest Arab ally. Hussein knew that if Mishal died his people would suspect him of having co-operated with the Israelis. His careful balancing of interests meant that Amman hosted both an Israeli embassy and Hamas headquarters. Though no friend to Hamas, this meant he could appease his country’s large Palestinian population and maintain some control over the group. The stability of his kingdom was under threat, so he bypassed diplomatic protocol and made a direct call to the US president Bill Clinton.

More here.

Sandeep Jauhar in The New York Times:

To meet the expenses of my growing family, I recently started moonlighting at a private medical practice in Queens. On Saturday mornings, I drive past Chinese takeout places and storefronts advertising cheap divorces to a white-shingled office building in a middle-class neighborhood. I often reflect on how different this job is from my regular one, at an academic medical center on Long Island. For it forces me, again and again, to think about how much money my practice is generating. A patient comes in with chest pains. It is hard not to order a heart-stress test when the nuclear camera is in the next room. Palpitations? Get a Holter monitor — and throw in an echocardiogram for good measure. It is not easy to ignore reimbursement when prescribing tests, especially in a practice where nearly half the revenue goes to paying overhead.

Few people believed the recent pledge by leaders of the hospital, insurance and drug and device industries to cut billions of dollars in wasteful spending. We’ve heard it before. Without fundamental changes in health financing, this promise, like the ones before it, will be impossible to fulfill. What one person calls waste, another calls income. It is doubtful that doctors and other medical professionals would voluntarily cut their own income (even if some of it is generated by profligate spending). Most doctors I know say they are not paid enough. Their practices are like cars on a hill with the parking brake on. Looking on, you don’t realize how much force is being applied just to maintain stasis.

More here.

Yee I-Lann. Sulu Stories: Sarung. 2005.

Digital print.

More here, here, and here.

Patrick Markey in the Washington Post:

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya prepared to fly back home on Sunday, setting the stage for a possible confrontation as the interim government that has defied international pressure said it would not let him enter the country.

Honduras' interim government, slapped with suspension from the Organization of American States over its refusal to reinstate Zelaya, said it would refuse Zelaya permission to land.

Zelaya, a leftist who had been due to leave power in 2010, was bundled out of office by troops and into exile a week ago in a military coup that has been widely condemned abroad.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, a leftist ally of Zelaya's, said U.N. General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto would accompany the ousted president on his planned return to Honduras.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I'm for the kids. It’s crazy not to be. Are you, dear reader, mighty Atlas, going to hold the world in place and keep it from changing into something new? One lesson of all hitherto existing human history is that the kids have the advantage in the long run. This is a function of time and finitude. The only real wisdom comes in realizing that the kids of today will get their comeuppance with the swift passing of a decade or so. They, too, will wake up one day to find themselves representatives of what was, instead of what shall be. The kids keep on coming.

We learned recently (from a New York Times article by Jennifer Schuessler) that Holden Caulfield, the anti-hero of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, has lost his appeal among the teenage crowd. This came without fair warning. No pimply representative of the Millennials stepped forward to cushion the blow. Instead, we are informed by Barbara Feinberg — “who has observed numerous class discussions of 'Catcher'” — that a 15-year-old boy from Long Island has said, “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’”

It is easy to respond defensively and with contempt. People don't like to have their heroes snubbed, especially when the snubbing comes from some little punk from Long Island whose fingers are surely rubbed raw from constant tweeting, texting, gaming, and masturbation. We (shall we define 'we' as that part of the population over 30?) find subtle ways to undercut the legions of cheeky hormone machines. Trying to explain the sudden disdain for Mr. Caulfield, a cultural critic by the name of Mr. Dickstein says,

The skepticism, the belief in the purity of the soul against the tawdry, trashy culture plays very well in the counterculture and post-counterculture generation. [Today], I wouldn’t say we have a more gullible youth culture, but it may be more of a joining or togetherness culture.

Indeed, Mr. Dickstein would never say that we have a more gullible youth culture now than in his time, except that he just did. Such are the sneaky tactics of the older generations in the face of youthful boldness.

More here.