Bruno Maddox on why it might, as far as he can tell, in DIscover:

For one thing, as far as I can tell, nobody knows how a magnet can move a piece of metal without touching it. And for another—more astonishing still, perhaps—nobody seems to care.

This information was not easy to come by. My copy of Electronics for Dummies now shares a shelf with Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics by Frederick Byron Jr. and Robert Fuller. Should a doctor at any point take a cross section of my brain, she will find patches of scarring and dead tissue, souvenirs of the time I pursued the mystery of magnetism across the 11-dimensional badlands of string theory. Students of human pathos may one day cherish the 16-minute recording of me, with my 100 percent positive-feedback rating as an eBay purchaser, failing to make renowned physicist Steven Weinberg, who won a Nobel for unifying electromagnetism with the so-called weak force, admit that he can’t explain how a magnet holds a dry-cleaning ticket to the door of a refrigerator.

But as far as I can tell—and isn’t the point of science that all its bigger propositions come accompanied by this noble caveat?—he really can’t.

Over at Studio 360, a radio discussion of Harold and Kumar that includes my sister Linta Varghese.

They say “tragedy plus time equals comedy,” and another film opening this weekend takes unjustly imprisoned terror suspects as its focus. This one is a comedy about two bong-loving stoners: “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.” Arun Rath explains why Harold and Kumar have become underground heroes for respectable Asian-Americans.

Nathalie Rothschild in Sp!ked:

Laura María Agustín’s provocative new book, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, really does what it says on the back cover: ‘[It] explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims, and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest.’

Agustín warns that ‘what we say about any given subject is always constructed, and there are only partial truths’. But you can disregard the book’s many postmodern caveats: this is an honest, complex and certainly convincing read. Agustín knows what she’s talking about – she has researched and worked with people who sell sex for over 10 years, including in Latin America and the Caribbean.

It is precisely the fact that Agustín has complicated the ‘discourse’ around trafficking, migration and sex work that seems to get the backs up of those who volunteer and are employed in what she terms the ‘rescue industry’.

‘I’m considered the devil by people in the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women’ (an international NGO), she tells me. ‘They have actually called me a pimp and have said that I associate with traffickers and that I’m in the pay of the sex industry, and any number of vile things.’

I would like to add a footnote to Saba Mahmood’s excellent piece “Is Critique Secular?” I think it’s important to explain the power that an affirmative answer to this question carries in our contemporary academy.

What are we to think of the idea, entertained by Rawls for a time, that one can legitimately ask of a religiously and philosophically diverse democracy that everyone deliberate in a language of reason alone, leaving their religious views in the vestibule of the public sphere? The tyrannical nature of this demand was rapidly appreciated by Rawls, to his credit. But we ought to ask why the proposition arose in the first place. Rawls’ point in suggesting this restriction was that everyone should use a language with which they could reasonably expect their fellow citizens to agree. The idea seems to be something like this. Secular reason is a language that everyone speaks, and can argue and be convinced in. Religious languages operate outside of this discourse, by introducing extraneous premises which only believers can accept. So let’s all talk the common language.

more from The Immanent Frame here.

Dan Colen and Nate Lowman’s collaboration at Maccarone has the look of now. Which is to say their show is a self-conscious pastiche of Warhol, Cady Noland’s junked-up approach, Richard Prince, quasi-slacker neo-punk, scuzz, stock ideas about mass culture, appropriation, assemblage, and a sort of car-wreck aesthetic. It’s a new hip academy.

That’s a good thing and a bad thing. Colen, who in January 2007 appeared on the cover of this magazine, in bed in his underpants with two other male artists, is known for his superrealist renderings of bird droppings (there’s a great one at Deitch Projects right now) and graffiti. Lowman is noted for his impressive handmade paintings of bullet holes and advertising. Along with Dash Snow and Terence Koh, they’re hotshots on the scene. Each on his own is good at this mannered nonstyle. But their show, while roguish, is merely occupying a well-defined position. A heat-seeking art world, mindlessly drawn to the familiar, has deemed that current art should look this way, so more art does. That’s part of the bad thing.

more from New York Magazine here.

History—the rational and methodical study of the human past—was invented by a single man just under twenty-five hundred years ago; just under twenty-five years ago, when I was starting a graduate degree in Classics, some of us could be pretty condescending about the man who invented it and (we’d joke) his penchant for flowered Hawaiian shirts.

The risible figure in question was Herodotus, known since Roman times as “the Father of History.” The sobriquet, conferred by Cicero, was intended as a compliment. Herodotus’ Histories—a chatty, dizzily digressive nine-volume account of the Persian Wars of 490 to 479 B.C., in which a wobbly coalition of squabbling Greek city-states twice repulsed the greatest expeditionary force the world had ever seen—represented the first extended prose narrative about a major historical event. (Or, indeed, about virtually anything.) And yet to us graduate students in the mid-nineteen-eighties the word “father” seemed to reflect something hopelessly parental and passé about Herodotus, and about the sepia-toned “good war” that was his subject. These were, after all, the last years of the Cold War, and the terse, skeptical manner of another Greek historian—Thucydides, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War, between Athens and Sparta, two generations later—seemed far more congenial. To be an admirer of Thucydides’ History, with its deep cynicism about political, rhetorical, and ideological hypocrisy, with its all too recognizable protagonists—a liberal yet imperialistic democracy and an authoritarian oligarchy, engaged in a war of attrition fought by proxy at the remote fringes of empire—was to advertise yourself as a hardheaded connoisseur of global Realpolitik.

more from The New Yorker here.

From MSNBC:

It’s been 55 years since the landmark paper on DNA’s double helix was published, and five years since scientists revealed the complete genetic code for humans. To mark the anniversary, Friday has been set aside as National DNA Day – and it’s a good time to reflect upon how genetics has transformed society. Since 2003, genetic analysis has opened a new medical frontier. Now a new social frontier awaits as well: Several ventures have set up social networks based on genetic profiles. But there’s also a potential dark side to the DNA revolution.

Socializing with DNA
The social trend is rooted in the search for family roots: For years, companies have been offering tests that analyze your DNA for genetic markers that are passed down from father to son, or from mother to children. But once your sample is analyzed, then what? The companies set up online forums that let the people who took the tests compare their results. That’s how I began determining lines of genetic relationships for my own family almost seven years ago – and how I was able to help match up Boyle relatives who didn’t know they were related until they took the test.

More here.

From The New York Times:

IN 1860, while studying primroses in the garden of Down House, his home in Kent, England, Charles Darwin noticed something odd about their blooms.

While all the flowers had both male and female parts — anthers and pistils — in some the anthers were prominent and in others the pistils were longer. So he experimented in his home laboratory and greenhouses, cross-pollinating some plants with their anatomical opposites. The results were striking. “He determined that if they cross-pollinate, they produce more seed and more vigorous seedlings,” said Margaret Falk, a horticulturalist and associate vice president at the New York Botanical Garden. The variation is evolution’s way of increasing cross-pollination, she said.

Now the Botanical Garden is replicating this work, and more of Darwin’s Down House experiments, in a stunning, multipart exhibition called “Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure.”

More here.

///
-another excerpt from
Under Milk Wood
Dylan Thomas

Oh there’s a face!
Where you get that hair from?
Got it from and old tom cat.
Give it back then, Love.
Oh, there’s a perm!

Where you get that nose from, Lily?
Got it from my father, silly.
You’ve got it on upside down!
Oh, there’s a conk!

Look at your complexion!
Oh no, you look.
Needs a bit of makeup.
Needs a veil.
Oh, there’s glamour!

Where you get that smile, Lil?
Never you mind, girl.
Nobody loves you.
That’s what you think.

Who is it loves you?
Shan’t tell.
Come on Lily.
Cross your heart, then?
Cross my heart.

And very softly, her lips almost touching her reflection,
she breathes the name and clouds the shaving glass.

///

Peter Singer in Project Syndicate:

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In response to the crimes committed during World War II, the Declaration sought to establish the principle that everyone is entitled to the same basic rights, irrespective of race, color, sex, language, religion, or other status. So, perhaps we can judge moral progress by asking how well we have done in combating racism and sexism.

Assessing the extent to which racism and sexism have actually been reduced is a daunting task. Nevertheless, recent polls by WorldPublicOpinion.org shed some indirect light on this question.

The polls, involving nearly 15,000 respondents, were conducted in 16 countries, representing 58% of the world’s population: Azerbaijan, China, Egypt, France, Great Britain, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, the Palestinian Territories, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States. In 11 of these countries, most people believe that, over their lifetimes, people of different races and ethnicities have come to be treated more equally.

Thomas Meaney in the WSJ:

Detlev Claussen’s “Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius” (readably translated from the German by Rodney Livingstone) should be read more as a companion to Adorno’s notoriously difficult writings than as a biography pure and simple. A former student of Adorno’s, Mr. Claussen is on intimate terms with the late master’s work, especially his correspondence with compatriots such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. But if Mr. Claussen excels at giving us a sense of the intellectual hotbed in which Adorno formed his ideas, he is too loyal an acolyte to engage the ideas themselves.

A better subtitle for his book might have been “One Last Marxist.” While Adorno was far from a salon-Bolshevik (he repeatedly scorned Brecht for his Soviet ties), he belonged to the last generation of German thinkers who tried to salvage Marx’s critique of capitalism. Instead of training their sights on the economic base, these Marxists — later known as the Frankfurt School — preferred to concentrate on the cultural realm.

Marxism denounced capitalism for producing poverty, but Adorno and company thought it created and satisfied too many needs, causing us to value nearly everything for its market price and not for itself. Repelled by the vulgarity of the bourgeoisie but unwilling to trust the taste of the proletariat, they hoped for a socialist solution that would somehow preserve a genuinely autonomous culture.

Arthur C. Clarke, who died last month, said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If we could land a jumbo jet beside a medieval village, would we not be worshiped as gods? The technology of interstellar travel, and the scientific knowledge on which it would be based, are as far beyond us as our present-day knowledge surpasses that of Dark Age peasants. Parting the Red Sea — or splitting the moon in two as Muhammad is alleged to have done — would be child’s play to those who command forces powerful enough to propel them from star to star.

But now the question arises: In what sense would the god-like aliens not be gods? Answer: In a very important sense. To deserve the name of God, a being would have to have designed more than just a jumbo jet or even a starship. He would have to have designed the universe. And therein lies a fundamental contradiction. Entities capable of designing anything, whether they be human engineers or interstellar aliens, must be complex — and therefore, statistically improbable. And statistically improbable things don’t just happen spontaneously by chance without an explanation trail. That is what “improbable” means, as creationists never tire of assuring us (they wrongly think Darwinian natural selection is a matter of chance).

more from the LA Times here.

In the summer of 1984, having co-edited the complete works of Shakespeare before reaching the age of thirty, Gary Taylor sat in the Bodleian Library, read all of Middleton and had an epiphany:

“Sometimes quietly moved to tears, sometimes unable to contain my laughter . . . I thought, again and again, why was I never told to read this? . . . Why have I never seen this performed? . . . why have I never been introduced to this Dickensian, Dostoevskian riot of life? Vindice, DeFlores, and Beatrice Joanna I’d encountered in college, but what about Allwit and all the rest? Lucifer, Candido, Quomodo, Sir Bounteous Progress, Dampit, Pieboard, Tailby, Weatherwise, Pompey Doodle, Captain Ager, Plumporridge, Simplicity, Simon, George, Lepet, the Yorkshire Husband, the Black Knight and Fat Bishop and White Queen’s Pawn, the Tyrant, the Lady, the Young Queen, the Duchess of Milan, Mistress Low-water, Mill, Valeria, Hecate and Madge Owl, Livia and Bianca and Isabella – where have you people been all my life?”

He vowed to right the wrong of the centuries’ neglect, to give Middleton the Collected Works he deserved, serving him as John Heminge and Henry Condell had served Shakespeare in the First Folio.

more from the TLS here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Flattened by a cold in 1998, Eric Lerner ’71, then a Hollywood screenwriter, picked up a biography of Allan Pinkerton, founder of the first detective agency in the United States. Three men were already working for Pinkerton in Chicago in 1856 when he hired Kate Warne as perhaps the first-ever female private eye. “The biographer dismissed rumors of a romantic relationship between Warne and Pinkerton,” says Lerner. “I literally dropped the book and laughed out loud—are you kidding me? She spends two years with him in Washington, D.C., while he is away from his family. He is at her bedside when she dies, and she is buried next to him. Rumors?”

Within two days, Lerner was proposing a movie about Pinkerton and Warne to a studio. “They bought it on a phone pitch,” he says. He got paid to write the screenplay, but, in one of Hollywood’s familiar patterns, “Before I finished the first draft, everyone was fired. It sat in a drawer for seven years before the rights reverted to me. By that time I didn’t want to write a screenplay ever again.” Screenplays, he reports, “are enormously confining: the story is there, but there is no voice in a movie. As a writer, I missed my own voice. I always loved the voice in a novel, the storyteller.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

As Kevin Warwick gently squeezed his hand into a fist one day in 2002, a robotic hand came to life 3,400 miles away and mimicked the gesture. The University of Reading cybernetics professor had successfully wired the nerves of his forearm to a computer in New York City’s Columbia University and networked them to a robotic system back in his Reading, England, lab. “My body was effectively extended over the Internet,” Warwick says.

It’s a far cry from his vision of transforming humanity into a race of half-machine cyborgs able to commune with the digital world—there is no spoon, Neo—but such an evolution is necessary, says 54-year-old Warwick. Those who don’t avail themselves of subcutaneous microchips and other implanted technology, he predicts, will be at a serious disadvantage in tomorrow’s world, because they won’t be able to communicate with the “superintelligent machines” sure to be occupying the highest rungs of society, as he explains in a 2003 documentary, Building Gods, which is circulating online.

Something of a self-promoter, Warwick, or “Captain Cyborg” as a U.K. newspaper once dubbed him, has appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and other shows on the TV talk circuit to tout his work. In his 2004 book, I, Cyborg, he describes his research as “the extraordinary story of my adventure as the first human entering into a cyber world.”

More here.

///
Planting the Alder
Seamus Heaney

For the bark, dulled argent, roundly wrapped
And pigeon-collared.

For the splitter-splatter, guttering
Rain-flirt leaves.

For the sub and clot of the first green cones,
Smelted ermerald, chrlorophyll.

For the scut and scat of the cones in winter,
So rattle-skinned, so fossil-brittle.

For the alder-wood, flame-red when torn
Branch from branch

But mostly for the swinging locks
of yellow catkins,

Plant it, plant it,
Streel-head in the rain.

from District and Circle, published 2006

///

[Thanks to Craig Marsden.]

Jared Diamond in The New Yorker:

State government is now so nearly universal around the globe that we forget how recent an innovation it is; the first states are thought to have arisen only about fifty-five hundred years ago, in the Fertile Crescent. Before there were states, Daniel’s method of resolving major disputes—either violently or by payment of compensation—was the worldwide norm. Papua New Guinea is not the only place where those traditional methods of dispute resolution still coexist uneasily with the methods of state government. For example, Daniel’s methods might seem quite familiar to members of urban gangs in America, and also to Somalis, Afghans, Kenyans, and peoples of other countries where tribal ties remain strong and state control weak. As I eventually came to realize, Daniel’s thirst for vengeance and his hostility to rival clans are really not so far from our own habits of mind as we might like to think.

More here.

Here, in Italy, I have developed the habit of cooking dinner almost every day (I usually eat the leftovers for lunch the next day). I wake up much earlier in the morning than I used to in New York, and am too tired to do much by about 6 in the evening. At that point, I find it relaxing to cook (I used to watch TV in New York, but don’t have one here, only religiously watching Stewart and Colbert iTunes downloads on my computer). I make it a point not to rush around the kitchen, instead taking my time to chop and peel things, talking to my wife or whoever else is around, finding stuff to post on 3QD while the onions are browning, etc. (One thing I really hate is when cooks try to show their expertise by chopping, say, an onion with an incredibly recklessly fast rat-a-tat-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta motion on the cutting board–as if the 19 seconds they just saved by endangering their fingers really makes any dent in the total time needed to cook the meal! It’s just a silly form of showing off, best suited to suburban Hibachi restaurants where the cooking at one’s table is more of a circus-act than a kind of craftsmanship, and where the children have been brought more for the entertainment than the food. All cutting, peeling, chopping, mincing, grating, etc. should be done calmly and slowly, and with the right knife–thanks, once again, for the Global, Asad–it is a meditative and enjoyable exercise.) It takes me anywhere from 90 to 150 minutes to prepare a multi-course meal, and so I completely agree with Ms. Shapiro here. It is simply not possible to cook well in 30 minutes (and certainly would not be enjoyable; adding to, rather than subtracting from, the day’s stress). Many things I make have cooking times longer than that, and prep and cleanup (which I do while I am cooking, so that after the meal only the plates we ate in need washing) take long too. It’s nice to have freshly cooked food every day. Try it.

Anyhow, here’s Laura Shapiro in Slate:

Fantasy has always played a big part in beat-the-clock cookbooks; in fact, the category relies on it, as Ramsay’s book makes clear. Despite the shopping lists, the step-by-step directions, the time-saving tips, and the authors who insist that this is exactly how they cook at home, there’s little that reflects the real world in such books. Like those gigantic, glossy tomes with titles like My Kitchen in the Wine Country or Tuscany at Table, the quick-cook books are wish books. They’re cheaper, friendlier, and far more portable than their $75 siblings, but they’re wish books all the same. Open a quick-cook book and you’re transported—not to some Provencal dreamscape but to your own kitchen. Why, that’s you at the counter, cheerfully putting together a charming meal for the family while your children set the table. You can practically see them storing up those all-important food memories that will accompany them through life like a St. Christopher medal.

If you’re an ordinary, sometimes bumbling home cook, it’s hard to resist a book that promises to impose factorylike precision on a chore that is by nature messy and unpredictable. Hence the popularity of stopwatch cuisine, which used to be known as “practical” or “simple” cookery and is now designated by sheer speed: The 60-Minute Gourmet, 30-Minute Meals, 29-Minute Meals, 20-Minute Menus, Fresh 15-Minute Meals, 10-Minute Cuisine, Rocco’s 5-Minute Flavor, The Last-Minute Cookbook. How do they do it?

More here.

The movie that I’ve been anticipating all year–Harold and Kumar Escape from Guntanamo Bay…yes, really, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guntanamo Bay–opens Friday.  In the National Post:

More recently, comic casting has been colour blind — think of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones battling illegal aliens of the extraterrestrial kind in Men in Black and its sequel. But the first Harold & Kumar movie in 2004 went a step further, taking second-tier movie minorities, usually cast for their martial arts prowess and bad-guy cred, and making them the stars. Screenwriters Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg even gave them the Everyman monikers Lee and Patel, more common than the surnames of Men in Black’s lead actors. (The Toronto white pages alone lists some 6,000 Lees and Patels.)

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle featured racial comedy, but never at the expense of its stars. The most blatant example is the bookish guy in the county lockup, arrested and roughed up for being black. Kumar (Kal Penn) gets to shout one pitch-perfect convenience-store “thank you come again!” and Harold (John Cho) frets about being invited to his Chinese friend’s all-Chinese get-togethers, but that’s about it.

In the sequel that opens Friday, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, the budget is bigger, the expectations greater and the stakes higher. As such, Hurwitz and Schlossberg have felt the need to widen their racial net. Again, however, Lee and Patel escape the brunt of the profiling, except for the unfortunate opening that finds them accused of being operatives of Al Qaeda and North Korea in cahoots.

[H/t: Linta Varghese]