At a moment in history when God is said to participate in world politics, the pungent ode to nature De rerum natura, composed by the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus, can provide a dose of sanity. What the atomist Epicurus called ataraxia—the tranquility of mind achieved when one is freed from the fear of occult controllers—Lucretius transformed into a prophetic materialism. His lyric treatise, published in the first century bce, predicts everything from atomic physics to the existence of DNA and casts it all in melodious hexameters.

Unlike the many prose versions of De rerum natura, David Slavitt’s new translation (University of California Press, $15) gives us six-beat English versions of the Latin original. Here’s how he renders the passage in which Lucretius acknowledges his debt to Epicurus:

It was long the case that men would grovel
upon the earth,
crushed beneath the weight of Superstition
whose head
loomed in the heavens, glaring down with her
dreadful visage
until Epicurus of Greece dared to look up and
confront her,
taking a stand against the fables and myths of
the gods . . .

more from Bookforum here.

As a drama writer it’s my job to place obstacles in the way of my characters: how they overcome those obstacles defines who they really are. I entered the 1970s as a hormonally unbalanced 12-year-old, facing a decade of obstacles armed only with a fresh patch of pubic hair, an ever-present erection and a Raleigh Chopper. What happened to me over those 10 years shaped and defined who I am, what I think and what I believe. And what a time to come of age: the decade that finally washed its hands of the lethargic, pot-smoking, flower-in-your-hair generation that preceded it and developed attitude. An attitude that was then squandered by the new romantic fops of the 80s. The 70s were special – don’t let anyone tell you different. We were no longer “going to Scarborough Fair” or wearing kaftans. We were a generation about to wear six-inch platform shoes and swap Donovan for Ziggy Stardust.

more from the Observer Review here.

When it comes to health care, economists ignore their own rules.

Dean Baker in the Boston Review:

Fundamental economic principles tell us that goods should be sold at their marginal cost of production—the cost of producing one more unit of the good. If a company needs to pay twenty dollars for the material and labor used to produce one more shirt, then shirts should sell for twenty dollars plus a small profit-earning markup. The price-equals-marginal-cost principle maximizes economic efficiency and limits opportunities for fraud and corruption. Building on this principle, economists also strongly advocate globalization: the elimination of trade barriers allows consumers to buy goods and services from where they are cheapest, thus maximizing global efficiency and output.

Unfortunately, when it comes to health care, these principles are routinely violated. Prescription drugs that could be manufactured and sold profitably for a few dollars per prescription may instead sell for thousands. Performing one more high-tech scan or other medical test may require just a few cents of electricity and a couple of hundred dollars worth of a technician’s or a doctor’s time. But diagnostic procedures can be billed at several thousand dollars a shot. Prices are often well above marginal costs, yet economists involved in health care reform rarely recognize this as a problem.

Nor do they show their usual zeal for trade. Health care may have features that make it place-specific, but globalization offers clear opportunities for gains.

More here.

James Trefil, Harold Morowitz, and Eric Smith in American Scientist:

In this article we present a view gaining attention in the origin-of-life community that takes the question out of the hatchery and places it squarely in the realm of accessible, plausible chemistry. As we see it, the early steps on the way to life are an inevitable, incremental result of the operation of the laws of chemistry and physics operating under the conditions that existed on the early Earth, a result that can be understood in terms of known (or at least knowable) laws of nature. As such, the early stages in the emergence of life are no more surprising, no more accidental, than water flowing downhill.

The new approach requires that we adopt new ways of looking at two important fields of science. As we will see below, we will have to adjust our view of both cellular biochemistry and thermodynamics. Before we talk about these new ideas, however, it will be useful to place them in context by outlining a little of the history of research on the origin of life.

More here.

Lecture at the University of Chicago by Ahmed Rashid in December of 2008:

The growing instability and resurgence of Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan pose a great threat to U.S. interests and global security. In his new book, Descent into Chaos, Ahmed Rashid examines the rising insurgency, booming opium trade, and weak governance in Afghanistan, concluding that U.S. strategy in the region has been a complete failure.

From The Washington Post:

Late in April 1844, a pair of misfits went camping on the Concord River in Massachusetts, with plans to survive “Indian-style” on the fish they caught. The forest along the banks was dangerously dry, but one of the young men started a campfire anyway. Encouraged by a brisk wind, the flames quickly spread to the grass and then to the pines and birch trees. Before the end of that awful day, 300 acres had been reduced to ash.

You know this accidental arsonist as the world's most famous naturalist, Henry David Thoreau. But to the aggrieved men of Concord, he was known for many years as that “damned rascal,” the “Woodsburner.” Not surprisingly, Thoreau didn't refer to this incident in his classic meditation on nature, “Walden; or, Life in the Woods.” He couldn't even bring himself to mention it in his own journal until six years after the fact, when he finally described the fire with such shameless pride and self-justification that you want to slap him upside his Transcendental head.

But now, 165 years later, that awful day finally bursts back into flame. John Pipkin's brooding first novel, “Woodsburner,” starts on the morning of April 30, as Henry David squats on the bank of Fair Haven Bay and strikes a match he bummed from a shoemaker. The novel ends that evening, as the blackened forest glows in the darkness and soot snows down on the town of Concord. Over the course of this momentous day, Pipkin moves back in time and across the Atlantic, describing several other characters whose lives are lit by their own fires and altered by Thoreau's conflagration.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

In September 1928, James Agee moved in to his freshman dorm at Harvard—room B-41 in George Smith Hall, a building that is now part of Kirkland House. Decades later, after Agee had become a kind of legend—for his tormented life and early death, no less than for his great books, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death in the Family—his roommate, Robert Saudek, remembered what it was like to catch a first glimpse of the 18-year-old Tennessean. Already, he wrote, Agee seemed somehow larger than life, more like an apparition or a force of nature than a college freshman:

The door burst open and in strode the roommate—tall, shy, strong, long arms and legs, a small head, curly dark hair, a spring in his heels as he bounded past with a wicker country suitcase in one hand and an enormous, raw pine box on his shoulder. He turned his head suddenly, squinted his eyes in an apologetic smile, said softly, “Hello, Agee’s my name,” swept through to an empty bedroom and deposited his belongings, bounded back through the gabled, maroon-and-white study, murmured “See you all later,” waved an awkward farewell and didn’t show up again for several days. Such was the magnetic field that had rushed through the room, that I didn’t even think to introduce myself. Now that I had seen him, heard him, and learned to pronounce his name, he was more of a stranger than before.

More here.

From The Front Table:

Two Faiths, One Banner by Ian Almond is an attempt to reverse one particularly dangerous strain of collective amnesia that has infected the world today. It is this collective amnesia that leads people to see Islam as deeply non-Western and a threat to the Christian West. If we are to continue writing the history of the West at all, Ian tells us, we must stop airbrushing Muslims and Jews out of it. So, he cleverly takes the idea of war and conflict, something we are all obsessed with these days (The War on Terror, The War on Drugs, Clash of Civilizations) and turns it on its head. He shows us how Muslims and Christians, far from having an unrelentingly antagonistic history, have often fought on the same side, against other Muslims and Christians, during defining moments of European history. From Andalusia, to Sicily, to Turkey, to Crimea, this is a history of the West that shakes us out of our collective amnesia. In the process, Ian also offers us an Islamic history of Europe.

It is not easy to stop forgetting. Amnesia is a wall. It partitions the past from the present. Muslim from Christian. Us from Them. You from Me. There is some comfort behind such partitions or we would not have been clinging to them for so long.

More here.

Monty Munford in The Telegraph:

Booksellers told The Daily Telegraph that while it is regarded in most countries as a 'Nazi Bible', in India it is considered a management guide in the mould of Spencer Johnson's “Who Moved My Cheese”.

Sales of the book over the last six months topped 10,000 in New Delhi alone, according to leading stores, who said it appeared to be becoming more popular with every year.

Several said the surge in sales was due to demand from students who see it as a self-improvement and management strategy guide for aspiring business leaders, and who were happy to cite it as an inspiration.

“Students are increasingly coming in asking for it and we're happy to sell it to them,” said Sohin Lakhani, owner of Mumbai-based Embassy books who reprints Mein Kampf every quarter and shrugs off any moral issues in publishing the book.

“They see it as a kind of success story where one man can have a vision, work out a plan on how to implement it and then successfully complete it”.

More here.

Jesse Bering in Scientific American:

Given the sobering costs of drinking on society (alcohol accounts for 70 percent of fatal traffic accidents, and nearly the same annual percentage of murders, spousal battery and child abuse) alcoholism has justifiably been the focus of considerable attention by clinical psychologists over the years. It’s certainly not my intent to downplay these serious issues associated with drinking. Believe me, here in Northern Ireland I’d wager there are more pubs than there are fast food restaurants in all of Texas, and one needn’t look far in Belfast to see how ruinous alcohol can be on the lives of those affected.

Yet one mustn’t always be a teetotaling bore, either. There is such a thing as responsible drinking; and over the past few decades, fun-loving psychologists have occasionally explored some of the quirky effects of moderate drinking on social behavior and cognition. Dostoyevsky used to refer to vodka as the “Russian God,” which, if you think about it, is still a decent metaphor for the type of spiritual escapism available in an 80 proof bottle of today’s Absolut. In fact, back in 1965, Harvard University psychologists Rudolf Kalin and David McClelland, along with Michael Kahn from Yale University, found precisely this type of “metaphysical” effect of drinking on male college students.

More here.

“The Philosophy of Composition” is a lovely little essay, but, as Poe himself admitted, it’s a bit of jiggery-pokery, too. Poe didn’t actually write “The Raven” backward. The essay is as much a contrivance as the poem itself. Here is a beautiful poem; it does everything a poem should do, is everything a poem should be. And here is a clever essay about the writing of a beautiful poem. Top that. Nearly everything Poe wrote, including the spooky stories for which he is best remembered, has this virtuosic, showy, lilting, and slightly wilting quality, like a peony just past bloom. Poe didn’t write “The Raven” to answer the exacting demands of a philosophic Art, or not entirely, anyway. He wrote it for the same reason that he wrote tales like “The Gold-Bug”: to stave off starvation. For a long while, Poe lived on bread and molasses; weeks before “The Gold-Bug” was published, he was begging near-strangers on the street for fifty cents to buy something to eat. “ ‘The Raven’ has had a great ‘run,’ ” he wrote to a friend, “but I wrote it for the express purpose of running—just as I did the ‘Gold-Bug,’ you know. The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.” The public that swallowed that bird and bug Poe strenuously resented. You love Poe or you don’t, but, either way, Poe doesn’t love you. A writer more condescending to more adoring readers would be hard to find. “The nose of a mob is its imagination,” he wrote. “By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.”

more from The New Yorker here.

In a recent profile in the New Yorker, McEwan said that he wants to ‘incite a naked hunger in readers’. I dislike strong narrative manipulation, but McEwan’s Collins-like surprises certainly work. They retain our narrative hunger, though perhaps at a cost. His addiction to secrecy has a way of ‘playing’ us, and if his withholdings ultimately seek to contain trauma, they also have the effect of reproducing, in plotted repetitions, the textures of the larger, originating traumas that are his big subjects. I don’t mean that his books traumatise us – that would be grossly unfair. Just that we finish them feeling a little guilty, having been exiled from our own version of innocence by a cunningly knowing authorial manipulator. The problem is that narrative secrets of this kind (large and small) ultimately exist only to confess themselves – that is their métier – and when they do we may find that the novels have become too easily comprehensible. (One definition of a narrative convention might precisely be: a secret that has finally confessed itself.) The Innocent, to select only one novel, too deftly tightens its little drawstring of thematics around a repeatedly underlined connection between tunnelling and sex, rape fantasies and war conquest, dismemberment of the body and dismemberment of Berlin into four sectors. Note, also, that many of these narrative secrets and withholdings are highly improbable. The woman who kept her pregnancy secret for nine months; the fact that the two dogs that attacked June Tremaine were also used by the Nazis to rape a woman; the dedicated, daylong fanaticism of Baxter, along with Perowne’s decision, at the end of the book, to perform surgery on the man who broke into his house and tried to rape his daughter; the fuse of unlikelihoods that sets fire to the plot of Atonement.

more from the LRB here.

Two things in particular impressed unity on twentieth-century America: the automobile and motion pictures. Although invented elsewhere (thus supplying another pair of reasons for French resentment of the US), their development into mass-produced vehicles of transport and entertainment was a function of Motown and Hollywood. As the movies lent celluloid wings to public fancy, the Canadian-born Mary Pickford became “America’s sweetheart”; at much the same time, Henry Ford’s Model-T gave ordinary Americans their ticket to ride when and where they wanted. In both Detroit and Los Angeles, the production line ruled. Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) would make cinematic fun of the piecemeal routine of industrial manufacture, but composite assembly was as much a feature of the seventh art as of any other manufacture. Although Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks might put a personal mark on a movie, many talents and many hands were needed for its processing and marketing. When the theatre’s personnel was translated to California, what early twentieth-century Broadway had called “The Show Business” (the definite article was later dropped) mutated into “The Industry”.

more from the TLS here.

Brian Ross at ABC News:

A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country's royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails.

A man in a UAE police uniform is seen on the tape tying the victim's arms and legs, and later holding him down as the Sheikh pours salt on the man's wounds and then drives over him with his Mercedes SUV.

In a statement to ABC News, the UAE Ministry of the Interior said it had reviewed the tape and acknowledged the involvement of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother of the country's crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed.

“The incidents depicted in the video tapes were not part of a pattern of behavior,” the Interior Ministry's statement declared.

The Minister of the Interior is also one of Sheikh Issa's brother.

The government statement said its review found “all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department.”

More, including the video, here. [Photo shows Sheikh Issa.]

From Science:

When it comes to assessing real estate, the house-hunting ant (Temnothorax albipennis) has a more pragmatic approach than does the average human. These 3-millimeter-long insects aren't comparison shoppers, new research using ants tagged with tiny radio transmitters shows, but rather have some strict ideas of what they are looking for. And when they find it, they don't get distracted by what may be around the corner; they move. T. albipennis lives in the cracks in rocks, but just any old stone won't do. The ants look for nests that are dry and dark. Previous studies suggested that when their nest is destroyed, the ants comparison shop for a new abode: In the lab, scout ants that visited both a nearby, low-quality nest and a high-quality nest nine times farther away ultimately settled on the better nest and then alerted the rest of the colony to the new digs. It seemed that the scouts were comparing the two potential homes.

But the new study indicates that the ants follow a simpler rule to make their decision. Researchers led by behavioral ecologist Elva Robinson of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom used an entomological pin to dot a bit of glue on an ant's thorax and then affixed a microtransmitter the size of a bit of glitter. The team attached these tags to every worker ant in nine colonies; each colony has between 100 and 200 workers and larvae. In the lab, Robinson's team simulated the ant's rock habitats with small stacks of glass and cardboard slides. She then destroyed their good homes by removing the top.

With their queen and larvae dangerously exposed, scouts set off in search of a new dwelling. As in the previous experiments, Robinson's team gave the ants two options: a nearby, low-quality home and a high-quality home nine times farther away. The majority of ants–about 75%–visited only one site and therefore could not be comparing them. Of the scouts that saw only the low-quality nest, 41% left after a short stay; in contrast, only 3% of the ants that visited the high-quality nest left. This suggests that the ants know what they're looking for–and after finding it, return to the old nest to recruit the rest of the colony to join them, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

More here.

The City
C.P. Cavafy

You said, “ I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, a better one than this.
Every effort of mine is a condemnation of fate;
and my heart is—like a corpse—buried.
How long will my mind remain in this wasteland.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see black ruin of my life here,
where I spent so many years destroying and wasting.”

You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
and you will grow gray in these same houses.
Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other—
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have destroyed your life here
in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.

from The Complete Poems of Cavafy; Harvest Books, 1961
Translation: Ray Dalven

The obituary seems to be experiencing a renaissance. In her 2006 book The Dead Beat, Marilyn Johnson reveals a worldwide ring of rabid obituary enthusiasts—members of the Church of Obituaries, she calls them. They flip past the Sports and Business sections eager to read the day’s death roll. They “surf the dead beat” poring [:)] over blogs and newspapers searching for fascinating facts about Antoinette K-Doe, who turned a nightclub into a public shrine to her husband, or the guy who invented sea monkeys. Obituaries aren’t dirty little secrets as much as they used to be, lurking in hidden corners and ready to terrify those who cross their path. They are public, normal, interesting, fun. There’s howtowriteanobituary.com which involves everyday people in the writing process, and patrickswayzeobituary.com, a forum writing the demise of the movie star even as he lives. There’s even a glossy online magazine with the snappy name Obit. But the real change is with the obituary writers. Once shamed to the backs of periodicals to deliver dour, Margie Zellner-style obituaries, many are now part of this new movement to “out” death by making it more accessible and “natural.” They are reconsidering the obituary not as the final judgment, but as a way death can be presented as a sum total of its stories. Everyone has stories, everyone dies, and in writing about death, death and life become more of a circle. The obituary is not the period on the sentence of existence, but a mere interpretation.

more from The Smart Set here.

—Smokey Bear, the guardian of our forests, has been a part of the American scene for so many years it is hard for us to remember when he first appeared. Dressed in a ranger's hat, belted blue jeans, and carrying a shovel, he has been the recognized forest fire prevention symbol for over 50 years.

Smokey the Bear Sutra
Gary Snyder

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago,
the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite
Void gave a Discourse to all the assembled elements
and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings,
the flying beings, and the sitting beings — even grasses,
to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from a
seed, assembled there: a Discourse concerning
Enlightenment on the planet Earth.

“In some future time, there will be a continent called
America. It will have great centers of power called
such as Pyramid Lake, Walden Pond, Mt. Rainier, Big Sur,
Everglades, and so forth; and powerful nerves and channels
such as Columbia River, Mississippi River, and Grand Canyon
The human race in that era will get into troubles all over
its head, and practically wreck everything in spite of
its own strong intelligent Buddha-nature.”

“The twisting strata of the great mountains and the pulsings
of volcanoes are my love burning deep in the earth.
My obstinate compassion is schist and basalt and
granite, to be mountains, to bring down the rain. In that
future American Era I shall enter a new form; to cure
the world of loveless knowledge that seeks with blind hunger:
and mindless rage eating food that will not fill it.”

And he showed himself in his true form of

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