A few years ago, my first novel was published. It did pretty well, won an award, was translated and sold around the world; the movie rights were even optioned. Now I want to put it online — no charge, no hook, no catch. My motivation is simple: greed.

My publishers are resolutely opposed to this idea. They fear it will “devalue the brand” and set a dangerous precedent. They fear, intuitively but wrongly, that fewer people will buy a book that is also given away for free. But most of all, they fear the future — and with good reason. Book publishing is a dinosaur industry, and there’s a big scary meteor on the way.

more from The Walrus here.

After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th century. It begins with a bleak page of epigraphs, among others from Isaiah Berlin — ‘the most terrible century in Western history,’ William Golding — ‘the most violent century in human history,’ and René Dumont — ‘I see it only as a century of massacre and war.’ This theme of ‘mankind’s worst century’ has become something of a cliché, and deserves closer examination, not least because it almost implies that the horrors of the age were natural catastrophes, like hurricanes or epidemics.

If you blink, then a perfectly obvious case can be made that the 20th century was far and away the best in human history. Any horrors it endured came not from evolutionary change but from unnatural aberrations, in the form of what men did to one another in the name of ideologies. Bernard Wasserstein takes the title of his excellent new book from Walter Benjamin: ‘There is no document of civilisation that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.’ This is a nice line, but it deserves the examiner’s ‘Discuss’. For much of European history, the Whig view — onward and upward — did not seem absurd, and that was never less so than 100 years ago, in that golden age so memorably apostrophised by Keynes. What any historian thus has to address is why Europe relapsed so terrifyingly into catastrophic war, despotism and mass murder.

more from The Spectator here.

For most of his life and more than a century after his death, Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) was known for two things – having his name hitched to a city and being Britain’s best painter of candlelight. Never mind the quirky portraits and the moonlit waterways, never mind the extraordinary scenes of scientific revelation for which he is now deservedly famous; what mainly struck the public, it seems, was Wright’s gift for making a drama out of candles in darkness.

This will seem odd to anyone who has ever seen his great work, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, in which a group of spectators is transfixed but also terrified by the theatre of science. Spooky lighting admittedly plays its part – the living faces, especially the showman-scientist, the pickled skull in the foreground, the cockatoo trapped in the deadly glass: all are illuminated by a single candle – but what compels is the terrible possibility that the bird will eventually be starved of oxygen altogether in order to demonstrate the novelty of the vacuum pump.

more from The Observer Review here.

Vikram Seth, author of the lyrical feast Golden Gate, gives us some monosyllabic poems inspired by George Herbert and tells of the source of the inspiration (via Amitava Kumar):

Host

I heard it was for sale and thought I’d go
To see the old house where
He lived three years, and died. How could I know
Its stones, its trees, its air,
The stream, the small church, the dark rain would say:
“You’ve come; you’ve seen; now stay.”

“A guest?” I asked. “Yes, as you are on earth.”
“The means?” “. . . will come, don’t fear.”
“What of the risk?” “Our lives are that from birth.”
“His ghost?” “His soul is here.”
“He’ll change my style.” “Well, but you could do worse
Than rent his rooms of verse.”

Joy came, and grief; love came, and loss; three years –
Tiles down; moles up; drought; flood.
Though far in time and faith, I share his tears,
His hearth, his ground, his mud;
Yet my host stands just out of mind and sight,
That I may sit and write.

In the NY Sun:

As if it didn’t already have enough, the East River seems to attract water: Last summer, its big draw was a floating swimming pool; this summer, it will be waterfalls — created by an artist.

Olafur Eliasson, a Danish–Icelandic artist whose installation “The Weather Project” drew 2 million people to the Tate Modern in 2003 and 2004, has designed what will likely be the city’s biggest public art project since Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates”: a series of freestanding waterfalls in the East River.

Mayor Bloomberg and the Public Art Fund, a private nonprofit organization that produced, among other works, Anish Kapoor’s “Sky Mirror” and Jeff Koons’s “Puppy,” both at Rockefeller Center, are scheduled to announce Mr. Eliasson’s project at the South Street Seaport tomorrow.

According to a source whom the mayor told about the project, the waterfalls will rise about 60 to 70 feet above the water — more than half as high as the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge. They will be visible from the area around the Seaport, from Brooklyn Heights, and from the Governors Island Ferry.

That mirror
   Which makes of men a transparency,
      Who holds that mirror
And bids us such a breast-bare spectacle see
      Of you and me?

      That mirror
   Whose magic penetrates like a dart,
      Who lifts that mirror
And throws our mind back on us, and our heart,
      Until we start?

      That mirror
   Works well in these night hours of ache;
      Why in that mirror
Are tincts we never see ourselves once take
      When the world is awake?

      That mirror
   Can test each mortal when unaware;
      Yea, that strange mirror
May catch his last thoughts, whole life foul or fair,
      Glassing it–where?

Thomas Hardy, Moments Of Vision And Miscellaneous Verses

From The Washington Post:

SELLOUT: The Politics of Racial Betrayal By Randall Kennedy

In a 1963 speech Malcom X distilled black America’s long history of social and political struggle into two simple yet enduring composites: House Negroes and Field Negroes. Field Negroes bore the brunt of racial oppression from antebellum slavery to the civil rights era’s high tide, while House Negroes craved white approval, shared secrets with racial oppressors and generally aided and abetted white supremacy. They were the race traitors, the sellouts, the Uncle Toms.

“Suspicions regarding racial betrayal continue to be omnipresent,” writes Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy in his slim but thought-provoking Sellout, which challenges conventional understanding of what exactly constitutes racial betrayal. American history is filled with instances in which prominent, successful blacks have been categorized as race traitors. While Booker T. Washington is often regarded as the quintessential “sellout” by some critics, prominent figures such as W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey also found their allegiance to black progress under question despite seemingly unassailable records as iconic “race men.”

Kennedy seeks to complicate standard discussions of racial betrayal by questioning the underlying assumptions behind such accusations. Were slaves who informed about plans for impending rebellion Uncle Toms or pragmatists unwilling to sacrifice friends and family for insurrections that seemed doomed to failure?

More here.

Berliner Philharmoniker, Conductor James Levine:

Apocalypse Now, Helicopter Attack (skip to 2:40 if you are impatient for Die Walküre):

I love the smell of Napalm in the morning:

Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I’m hopelessly conflicted about it. It’s the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.

It’s a decision that has fallen to his sole surviving heir (and translator), Dmitri Nabokov, now 73. Dmitri has been torn for years between his father’s unequivocal request and the demands of the literary world to view the final fragment of his father’s genius, a manuscript known as The Original of Laura. Should Dmitri defy his father’s wishes for the sake of “posterity”?

For the past two years I’ve involved myself in this question in print and in e-mail correspondence with Dmitri Nabokov, but a recent communication from Dmitri to me suggests that a decision may be near. And so the time seems right to share with Slate readers my own deeply divided feelings about Dmitri’s choice and to see what they make of his dilemma.

more from Slate here.

Searle’s earliest published work was squarely in this tradition, focusing on foundational issues in the workings of ordinary language. But at the end of the 1950s he returned to America and joined the Department of Philosophy at Berkeley, where he has remained ever since. Over the years Searle has drifted away from his Oxford roots. Initially he continued his work in the philosophy of language. His first book, Speech Acts, published in 1969, developed Austin’s analysis of the different ways in which language can be used. But by the 1980s he had ceased to place language at the centre of the philosophical enterprise, and had come to regard the human mind as the more fundamental realm, with language merely the medium by which we make thought public. Moreover, there is something decidedly unOxonian about Searle’s current programme of explaining how humans fit into the world of basic science. His teachers would have viewed any such ambition as a species of American vulgarity. Oxford philosophy has long been deeply anti-scientific, regarding it as some kind of category mistake to suppose that scientific findings can in any way threaten or illuminate our everyday understanding of people.

Still, there is one respect in which Searle remains loyal to his old tutors. Whenever he is faced with a conflict between common sense and arcane philosophical doctrine, he backs common sense every time.

more from the TLS here.

Via Political Theory Daily Review, Bee Wilson in the FT:

This is a tale of two pigs. The first – let’s call him Soren – is reared in Denmark. For the first few months of his life, he lives a cramped existence in a barn. This pink, flabby creature is castrated so that his meat won’t taste too strong. When at last he is allowed outside, his only freedom is a small concrete run. At a young age, he is killed and turned into bacon, using potassium nitrate and sodium nitrite. When you put slices of him in a pan, white watery liquid runs out.

The second – let’s call him Juan – was lucky enough to be born in the Iberian peninsula. He is sleek, black and hairless, a descendant of the original wild boar. Juan spends his life munching acorns among the oak trees. By the standards of animals destined for pork, he is allowed to live a long, calm life. He is only killed when he is 20 months, oldish for a pig, after which time his flesh is cured in sea salt until his fat turns to oleic acid, a fatty acid similar to that in olive oil. Juan is now jamón ibérico de bellota . When you eat slices of him, the salty flesh melts in your mouth.

It should be perfectly obvious which pig has led a better life and makes for better food. But there is one further crucial difference between the two. Because he has had only organic feed and has not suffered the worst indignities of factory farmed pigs – overcrowding and no access to outdoor space – Soren the Danish pig ends his life in a British supermarket labelled “organic”. Whereas Juan, for technical reasons, doesn’t qualify for the organic label.

“Organic” has become a word in which we have invested many contradictory dreams about food. Organic food sales in Britain are now worth more than £2bn a year. “Organic” is a magic charm, to protect us against the squalor, the chemicals and industrial scale on which most of what we eat is produced. Like any magic charm, it can’t possibly do all we expect of it.

The graphic novel developed for the Sony PSP is also available online:

In the LRB, Eric Hobsbawm remembers Weimar Germany:

I spent the most formative time of my life, the years 1931-33, as a Gymnasiast and would-be Communist militant, in the dying Weimar Republic. Last autumn I was asked to recall that time in an online German interview under the title ‘Ich bin ein Reiseführer in die Geschichte’ (‘I am a travel guide to history’). Some weeks later, at the annual dinner of the survivors of the school I went to when I came to Britain, the no longer extant St Marylebone Grammar School, I tried to explain the reactions of a 15-year-old suddenly translated to this country in 1933. ‘Imagine yourselves,’ I told my fellow Old Philologians, ‘as a newspaper correspondent based in Manhattan and transferred by your editor to Omaha, Nebraska. That’s how I felt when I came to England after almost two years in the unbelievably exciting, sophisticated, intellectually and politically explosive Berlin of the Weimar Republic. The place was a terrible letdown.’

The cover of Eric Weitz’s excellent and splendidly illustrated Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy brings back memories.[*] It shows the old Potsdamer Platz long before its transformation into a ruin at the hands of Hitler and into Disneyland architecture in the reunified Germany. Not that daytime cafés full of men in trilbys like my uncle were the habitat of Berlin teenagers. We were more likely to think of boats on the Wannsee, a place not yet associated with planned genocide.

From the Lab Reporter:

Dr Brian Cox takes us on a tour of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva – the biggest, most complicated machine ever built. It’s costing millions of pounds and has thousands of scientists from around the world waiting to use it as part of the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted. Once switched on, it will allow scientists to recreate the conditions that existed in the first moments after the Big Bang. The film also features Brian and other CERN scientists explaining what results they hope will emerge from the most exciting scientific experiment of our time.

More films here.  [Thanks to Alom Shaha.]

Pervez Hoodbhoy in the International Herald Tribune:

A cacophony of protests in Pakistan greeted a recent statement by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammad ElBaradei. “I fear that chaos, or an extremist regime, could take root in that country, which has 30 to 40 warheads,” he said. He also expressed fear that “nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of extremist groups in Pakistan or Afghanistan.”

But in Pakistan, few worry. The Strategic Plans Division, which is the Pakistani agency responsible for handling nuclear weapons, exudes confidence that it can safely protect the country’s “crown jewels.” The SPD is a key beneficiary of the recently disclosed secret $100 million grant by the Bush administration, the purpose of which is to make Pakistan’s nuclear weapons safer.

This money has been put to use. Indeed, ever since Sept. 11, 2001, there has been a regular traffic of Pakistani military officers to and from the United States for coaching in nuclear safety techniques. While multiple layers of secrecy make it hard to judge success, the improvement in the SPD’s public relations is palpable. PowerPoint presentations, guided tours of military headquarters and calculated expressions of openness have impressed foreign visitors.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Judah Folkman, “the father of antiangiogenesis,” a way to starve tumors of their blood supplies, died yesterday from an apparent heart attack. He was 74 years old. Folkman, director of the Vascular Biology Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, served as the hospital’s surgeon in chief from 1967 to 1981. During his tenure, he published a groundbreaking article in The New England Journal of Medicine, suggesting that tumors require angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels (from established ones) to provide the nutrients their cells need to grow beyond a certain size. He had first had this insight in the 1960s when he was serving as a Navy surgeon and was tasked with developing a blood substitute that could be a lifesaver during combat. (At the time, it was cancer research dogma that tumors did not need new vessels to thrive.)

For much of the next two decades Folkman was treated as a pariah by his peers, who dismissed his theory outright. He was criticized whenever he announced a finding. To continue his unpopular research after all other funding sources dried up, he was forced to take a hefty sum—$23 million—from chemical company Monsanto. Convinced he was on the right track, he persevered in the face of adversity. By the mid-1990s the tide turned in his favor when researchers in his lab discovered that two natural proteins, angiostatin and endostatin, could effectively block angiogenesis.

More here.

From the BLAST website:

Filmmaker Paul Devlin grew up in a family of scientists. He spent summers at the high energy accelerator, Fermilab, where his particle physicist father was on the team searching for the top quark. One brother attended MIT and the other became a prominent astrophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the summer of 2005, this brother, Mark Devlin, invited Paul to Arctic Sweden to document the launch of Mark’s groundbreaking telescope, BLAST. BLAST stands for Balloon-bourne, Large Aperture, Sub-millimeter Telescope, and is designed to gather information on how our universe evolved by discovering thousands of the most ancient galaxies in order to unlock the mystery of how the first generation of stars were formed. To see these celestial births, it must go through a risky launch on a NASA high-altitude balloon and float above the opaque atmosphere for several days on its way to Arctic Canada.

When Paul arrives, tensions within the collaboration are high as technical obstacles and the worst weather in decades have delayed the experiment for weeks.

More here. [Go to Press Kit.] The film’s financing is interesting: “BLAST is opening itself up, via ArtistShare (the first film to do so on ArtistShare), to interested participants on several levels. If you want to be Executive Producer, $150k gets you there. Want to participate on other levels, from $50k down to $19.95? No problem: There are a total of nine levels of participation.”  [Thanks to Craig Peters.]

The Hazaras cherish education and hard work, but their Shiite Muslim faith and Asian features have long made them a target. Will they find a better life in the post-Taliban era?

Phil Zabriskie in National Geographic:

At the heart of Afghanistan is an empty space, a striking absence, where the larger of the colossal Bamian Buddhas once stood. In March 2001 the Taliban fired rockets at the statues for days on end, then planted and detonated explosives inside them. The Buddhas had looked out over Bamian for some 1,500 years. Silk Road traders and missionaries of several faiths came and went. Emissaries of empires passed through—Mongols, Safavids, Moguls, British, Soviets—often leaving bloody footprints. A country called Afghanistan took shape. Regimes rose and collapsed or were overthrown. The statues stood through it all. But the Taliban saw the Buddhas simply as non-Islamic idols, heresies carved in stone. They did not mind being thought brutish. They did not fear further isolation. Destroying the statues was a pious assertion of their brand of faith over history and culture.

It was also a projection of power over the people living under the Buddhas’ gaze: the Hazaras, residents of an isolated region in Afghanistan’s central highlands known as Hazarajat—their heartland, if not entirely by choice. Accounting for up to one-fifth of Afghanistan’s population, Hazaras have long been branded outsiders. They are largely Shiite Muslims in an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim country. They have a reputation for industriousness yet work the least desirable jobs. Their Asian features—narrow eyes, flat noses, broad cheeks—have set them apart in a de facto lower caste, reminded so often of their inferiority that some accept it as truth.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

Dear Reader,

On the occasion of our 1,000th post at 3QD I had written a short note to our readers. It is now my privilege to announce that in the less-than-three-years since that time we have done more than 9,000 more posts, and this happens to be the ten thousand and tenth post at 3QD. I had planned to do it as the 10,000th post, but forgot yesterday! 🙁

The actual 10,000th post was done early this morning by my sister Azra (on Elias Khoury’s new novel), whose record of consistency in posting two interesting items daily is truly remarkable. As far as I know she has never missed a single day, six days a week, in the last three years. She is the Cal Ripken, Jr. of 3QD. (He played in a record 2,632 straight baseball games spanning sixteen seasons.) My friend Morgan continues to scour the web for intellectually stimulating material and consistently manages to surprise and please me with his finds. My sister Sughra comes up with a fascinating art image, and links to more information to go along with it, every Monday without fail. And last, but by no means least, my friend and colleague, Robin Varghese, in addition to his usual erudite selection of links, has also taken over some of the other duties I used to perform at 3QD (and also stepped up his number of daily posts) so that I can have some time to do other work during my sabbatical in Italy. 3QD takes a lot of person-hours to do daily because we look at a very large number of sources before making our selections of what to post. I could not possibly do it on my own (at least while maintaining the current variety). So my heartfelt thanks go to Azra, Morgan, Sughra, and Robin.

A little more than two-and-a-half years ago I wrote the first Monday column at 3QD. Since that time, we and our guest columnists have published approximately 500 (yeah, count ’em!) original essays, making Mondays our most heavily trafficked day. (The champion is my prolific nephew Asad Raza who has written 46 excellent essays for 3QD so far, and shows no signs of slowing. Thanks, Asad!) But I would like to express my gratitude and my congratulations to all our guest contributors for making Mondays at 3QD so special.

And finally, I would like to thank you, Dear Reader, for visiting our site and engaging in such stimulating conversation with us through the comments section and in private emails. Please tell all your friends and colleagues about 3QD. And best wishes for a great 2008!

Yours,

Abbas

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Last week I wrote about a new study that identified a fossil mammal as the closest relative to whales, helping to shed light on how whales moved from land to sea. The mammal, Indohyus, was a small four-legged creature that probably spent a fair amount of time in water and ate vegetation. The authors of the new study proposed that the ancestors of whales originally lived this way. Gradually, the whale lineage became more adapted to life in water and shifted to eating meat, as exemplified by early whales like Ambulocetus, which was something like a furry alligator.

In the comment thread, Noumenon asked this question:

I don’t understand how Indohyus and Ambulocetus, both dated to around 47 mya, can both be the ancestors of today’s whales. You say carnivory was an important transition for whales. Then Indohyus would have had to split off before Pakicetus, before whales became carnivorous.

Via email, I got a similar question from a biologist I know who is working on a book about evolution. He had read about the discovery in this article by Ian Sample in the Guardian, who declared:

Fossil hunters have discovered the remains of the earliest ancestor of the modern whale: a small deer-like animal that waded in lagoons and munched on vegetation.

So how can an ancestor be younger than its descendants?

More here.