Tom Hanks plays “Good Time” Charlie Wilson, a go-along-to-get-along Democratic congressman from a rural district in Texas. A hard-drinking womanizer with a sharp eye for foreign affairs, Charlie sits on the congressional committee responsible for funding covert military actions abroad. One debauched evening in 1980, soaking in a Vegas hot tub with a gaggle of coke-snorting strippers, he watches Dan Rather on TV covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Soon after, a fervently anti-Communist Houston socialite, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), invites Charlie to a fund-raiser for the cause of the mujahideen. The two skip out of the party for some (off-screen) Texas lovin’, and by way of pillow talk, Joanne convinces Charlie to take a meeting she’s arranged with the president of Pakistan, Zia ul-Haq (Om Puri).
Converted to the freedom fighters’ cause—or maybe just in love with the idea of bringing down the Red Army on his own—Charlie mobilizes a clandestine campaign to funnel resources and weapons to the Afghan rebels. With one well-placed phone call, he manages to double the appropriations budget, but even $10 million is a paltry sum when it comes to shooting down Soviet helicopters.
A couple of million years ago or so, our hominid ancestors began exchanging their lowbrow looks for forehead prominence. The trigger for the large, calorie-hungry brains of ours is cooking, argues Richard W. Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He hit on his theory after decades of study of our closest cousin, the chimpanzee. For the Insights story “Cooking Bigger Brains,” appearing in the January 2008 Scientific American, Rachael Moeller Gorman talked with Wrangham about chimps, food, fire, human evolution and the evidence for his controversial theory. Here is an expanded interview.
The breakthrough of this year has to do with humans, genomes, and genetics. But it is not about THE human genome (as if there were only one!). Instead, it is about your particular genome, or mine, and what it can tell us about our backgrounds and the quality of our futures. A number of studies in the past year have led to a new appreciation of human genetic diversity. As soon as genomes are looked at individually, important differences appear: Different single-nucleotide polymorphisms are scattered throughout, and singular combinations of particular genes forming haplotypes emerge. A flood of scans for these variations across the genome has pointed to genes involved in behavioral traits as well as to those that may foretell deferred disease liability. And more extensive structural variations, such as additions, deletions, repeat sequences, and stretches of “backwards” DNA, turn out to be more prevalent than had been recognized. These too are increasingly being associated with disease risks.
High-throughput sequencing techniques are bringing the cost of genomics down. The few “celebrity genomes” (e.g., Watson’s and Venter’s) will soon be followed by others, we hope in an order not determined by wealth but by scientific need or personal medical circumstance. Our natural interest in personal genealogy, accompanied by worries about our health, will create an incentive structure that even now is creating a sometimes dubious niche market for having one’s genome “done.”
From the plane into Edmonton International, I could see the city to the north, this treasure chest metropolis sprung up in the middle of nowhere. I was flying in with a four-year plan. Big skies, big bucks, live simple, get out. A job with Sirius Gas. Maybe you know it. A little travel, not much. Calgary mostly. Fort McMurray. Basically a desk operation downtown paying two and a half times what I was worth. I liked the people. I find it refreshing working with straight arrows. The problem was, at the end of the day they went home to their families in suburbs called Spruce Grove or Sherwood Park and I went back to my bachelor suite on Sask Drive. Not that my building didn’t live up to its motto: A Nice Place for Nice People. I’ll fit right in, I thought. That was before I got so lonely I was ready to slit my wrists. Before a madman became my best friend. Before I found out how good a pretty blonde can look in a strap-on.
This exhibition of late paintings of Jules Olitski, who died earlier this year at age 84, is subtitled “A Celebration” — an apt name for such festive and colorful paintings. But these works equally bring to mind volcanic eruptions or intergalactic collisions. Worked with impasto so intense that the encrusted surfaces appear to belong as much to bas relief as to paint on canvas, they emulate geological formation both in physical fact and suggested scenes. Even if the world ends with a whimper, Jules Olitski departed with a bang.
The subtitle is also apropos for a gentle giant of an abstractionist who adopted as his personal, anti-entitlement motto: “expect nothing, do your work, and celebrate.” “Bathsheba Reverie — Yellow and Black” (2001), like all works here in acrylic paint on canvas, has at its base a disintegrating orb in fiery yellow, which dominates the composition, and is cracking, seemingly under the sheer weight of its drying pigment. It inhabits a rich but ambiguous pocket of space that is itself contained by a monochrome purple ground just spied around its edges. Roughly an oval shape, this space looks like a puddle still in formation, perhaps about to submerge the entirety of the purple ground: Lush and painterly, it has an atmospheric quality that recalls a sky by Constable or Turner.
Buffon’s contemporary influence was massive. Not only did he sell vast quantities of books, but his approach deeply influenced the most famous eighteenth-century publication, Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Some entries in the Encyclopédie were simply taken from Buffon, and Diderot followed Buffon’s lead in considering that natural history provided a key for understanding the whole of the world. Diderot also agreed about the importance of the comparative method – one of the foundations of Buffon’s epistemology. With this kind of intellectual pedigree, and a superb style – Rousseau said of him, “C’est la plus belle plume de son siècle” – Buffon should be more widely read.
The best bits of Buffon have now been condensed by Stéphane Schmitt and Cédric Crémière, and bound in the dark blue leather of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Schmitt is also the driving force behind the ambitious project from Éditions Honoré Champion – republishing the whole of L’Histoire naturelle for the first time in over a century. The first wrist-spraining volume has just appeared, and it is a marvellous monument to Buffon’s vision, and to Schmitt’s scholarship.
Toxic components of discarded electronics are ending up overseas:
Chris Carroll in National Geographic:
Israel Mensah, an incongruously stylish young man of about 20, adjusts his designer glasses and explains how he makes his living. Each day scrap sellers bring loads of old electronics—from where he doesn’t know. Mensah and his partners—friends and family, including two shoeless boys raptly listening to us talk—buy a few computers or TVs. They break copper yokes off picture tubes, littering the ground with shards containing lead, a neurotoxin, and cadmium, a carcinogen that damages lungs and kidneys. They strip resalable parts such as drives and memory chips. Then they rip out wiring and burn the plastic. He sells copper stripped from one scrap load to buy another. The key to making money is speed, not safety. “The gas goes to your nose and you feel something in your head,” Mensah says, knocking his fist against the back of his skull for effect. “Then you get sick in your head and your chest.” Nearby, hulls of broken monitors float in the lagoon. Tomorrow the rain will wash them into the ocean.
People have always been proficient at making trash. Future archaeologists will note that at the tail end of the 20th century, a new, noxious kind of clutter exploded across the landscape: the digital detritus that has come to be called e-waste.
Instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world—of having a unity in which scholarship includes science and technology along with literature and art—the official culture has kicked them out. Science and technology appear as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities have nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum—and out of the minds of many young people, who, arriving at their desks at the establishment media, have so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action. Clueless, they don’t even know that they don’t know.
But science today is changing our understanding of our universe and species, and scientific literacy is indispensable to dealing with some of the world’s most pressing issues. Fortunately, we live in a time when third culture intellectuals—scientists, science journalists, and other science-minded writers—are among our best nonfiction writers, and their many engaging books have brought scientific insight to a wide audience.
We are pleased to present a list of books published in 2007 by Edge contributors (and others in the science-minded community) for your holiday pleasures and challenges.
The word “big” doesn’t do justice to whales. Humpback whales can weigh up to 40 tons. Fin whales have been known to reach 80 tons. Blue whales, the biggest animals to have ever lived, reach 160 tons — the same mass as about 2,000 grown men or 5 million grown mice.
It takes a lot of food to build such giant bodies, but how exactly the biggest whales get so much has long been a mystery. “We don’t have much of a sense of these animals in their natural environments,” said Nick Pyenson, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. For decades, whale experts had only indirect clues. “It’s primarily from dead animals or from a few people standing on a ship seeing whales come to the surface,” he said.
With so little information, scientists have struggled to make sense of several enigmas about the biggest whales. “It’s always been a mystery why they have really short dives for their body size,” Mr. Pyenson said. The bigger a marine mammal is, the longer it should be able to dive for food, because it has more muscle tissue in which it can store oxygen. Other species follow this pattern, but the biggest whales do not.
Mr. Pyenson and his colleagues may have solved some of the gastronomical mysteries of these leviathans by creating the first detailed biomechanical model of a feeding fin whale. In essence, they have created the world’s biggest gulp.
KARACHI: In an incident that shocked art lovers and a legion of admirers, the country’s most celebrated artist Ismail Gulgee, along with his wife and maid, was found strangled to death at his home in Clifton on Wednesday. The bodies were three days old and the artist’s driver and other servants were missing. A case was lodged at the Boating Basin police station on the complaint of the son of the deceased, the well-known sculptor Amin Gulgee.
Imagine taking the industrial design smarts behind the iPod and applying it to the far more basic technology needs of the extremely poor. In the past, few top designers would have bothered. But that’s changing.
At MIT, Stanford, and other universities, young design and engineering talents are eagerly enrolling in courses that teach them how to meet the technology needs of the developing world. Stanford offers a course called “Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability.” One of the teachers, David Kelley, is the founder of IDEO, the industrial design firm behind such tech classics as the Palm V PDA and the first production mouse for the Lisa and Macintosh computers from Apple.
Amy B. Smith, an inventor who lectures at MIT, said her course on design for the developing world gets about a hundred applicants, but she can only take 30.
Smith was a lead organizer behind the International Development Design Summit (www.iddsummit.org), held at MIT this summer and planned again for next year. Mechanics, doctors and farmers from around the developing world teamed up with top design talents to come up with “pro-poor” technologies that are inexpensive and effective. One, an off-grid refrigeration unit, uses PVC piping, tiny water drips, and an evaporation-based cooling method to store perishable food in rural areas.
Mustafa Barghouthi, member of the Palestinian parliament and former candidate for president of the Palestinian Authority, and a founder of the Palestinian National Initiative, in The Baltimore Sun (reprinted in electronic intifada):
As one who for decades has supported a two-state solution and the nonviolent struggle for Palestinian rights, I view the recent conference in Annapolis with a great deal of skepticism — and a glimmer of hope.
Seven years with no negotiations — and increasing numbers of Israeli settlers, an economic blockade in Gaza and an intricate network of roadblocks and checkpoints stifling movement in the West Bank — have led us to despair and distrust. Any commitment must be made not only to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008 but also to end Israel’s occupation.
The Palestinians must also heal their internal divisions. This must include institutional reform to root out corruption and nepotism. The first step in that process is democratic elections at all levels of government.
We must rid ourselves of the false dichotomy between Fatah and Hamas. These are not the only options. My movement, the five-year-old Palestinian National Initiative, offers an alternative emphasizing democratic elections, transparent government and institution-building. Our goal is to democratize and engage the Palestinian national movement in a unified strategy to confront Israel’s ongoing occupation and seizure of our land and resources. We strive to achieve our national rights in our homeland and to establish social justice to uphold the rights of the underprivileged and marginalized, including women, children and people with disabilities.
My two favorite books of 2007 could not have less in common on the surface. Yet “Matters of Honor” (Knopf, 320 pages, $24.95), a novel by Louis Begley, and “Ambition and Survival” (Copper Canyon, 249 pages, $18), a prose collection by Christian Wiman, converge in ways that suggest how little the outward tokens of “identity” have to do with a writer’s true self. Mr. Begley, a Jewish Holocaust survivor in his 70s, and Mr. Wiman, born to a Southern Baptist family in Texas in the 1960s, are united by their devotion to literary art, and their ironic awareness of the cost that devotion exacts. Perhaps it is because these two books are so morally and intellectually strenuous — though never recondite, and always absorbing — that they were greeted with resistance by many reviewers.
Alfred North Whitehead famously described the European philosophical tradition as “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Whether or not this is fair to the thinkers that followed Plato, it is a gross injustice to those that preceded him. Pre-eminent among these was Parmenides. Elizabeth Anscombe’s riposte that Plato might be regarded as “Parmenides’s footnote” is not as perverse as it seems. While Plato’s dialogues are among the supreme philosophical works of the western tradition, it was Parmenides who established the implicit framework of their debates.
Plato acknowledged that Parmenides had “magnificent depths.” But there is more to Parmenides than this: in his thought, human consciousness had a crucial encounter with itself. This was, I believe, a decisive moment in the long awakening of the human species to its own nature. From this self-encounter resulted the cognitive self-criticism, the profound critical sense that gave birth to the unfolding intellectual dramas of metaphysics and science that have in the last century or so approached an impasse.
First, a somewhat spittle-laden squawk: how one positively slavers for a good biography of the astonishing French artist known as Claude Cahun (1894-1954). Mention her in conversation and you are likely to draw a puzzled ‘Claude who?’ even from otherwise predatory culture vultures. In my own case – it’s true – certain vile French diphthongs may be part of the problem: the phonetic distinctions between Cahun, Caen, Caïn, Cannes, Cohn, canne, cane, cagne, camp, cône and con remain, sadly, a perpetual trial. Yet it’s also undeniable: though one of the most extraordinary personalities associated with both the French Surrealist movement and the Resistance, Cahun is still scarcely known to an English-speaking public.
Which isn’t to say she has languished in utter obscurity. In the baleful little world of academic ‘gender studies’ (strap-ons and piercings strongly advised) the cross-dressing Cahun has been a cult heroine for a decade or two. Nor is it difficult to see why. She was an inventive and fearless early practitioner of set-up photography: the self-conscious ‘staging’ of images in order to produce a theatrical or conceptual effect. And as with many other set-up specialists, Cahun was her own favourite subject. Though it’s hard to say if she knew the work of either, two of her most notorious precursors in this regard were the Countess of Castiglione (1837-99), a wealthy and eccentric Franco-Italian narcissist who hired a studio photographer to take scores of secret pictures of her in bizarre poses and costumes, and the Stieglitz associate F. ‘Fred’ Holland Day, whose semi-nude impersonation of Jesus Christ on the Cross – at once gauzy, grisly and homoerotic – provoked a scandal when he exhibited the photographs in 1898.
In 1937, twenty-nine per cent of American adults told the pollster George Gallup that they were reading a book. In 1955, only seventeen per cent said they were. Pollsters began asking the question with more latitude. In 1978, a survey found that fifty-five per cent of respondents had read a book in the previous six months. The question was even looser in 1998 and 2002, when the General Social Survey found that roughly seventy per cent of Americans had read a novel, a short story, a poem, or a play in the preceding twelve months. And, this August, seventy-three per cent of respondents to another poll said that they had read a book of some kind, not excluding those read for work or school, in the past year. If you didn’t read the fine print, you might think that reading was on the rise.
You wouldn’t think so, however, if you consulted the Census Bureau and the National Endowment for the Arts, who, since 1982, have asked thousands of Americans questions about reading that are not only detailed but consistent. The results, first reported by the N.E.A. in 2004, are dispiriting. In 1982, 56.9 per cent of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the previous twelve months. The proportion fell to fifty-four per cent in 1992, and to 46.7 per cent in 2002. Last month, the N.E.A. released a follow-up report, “To Read or Not to Read,” which showed correlations between the decline of reading and social phenomena as diverse as income disparity, exercise, and voting. In his introduction, the N.E.A. chairman, Dana Gioia, wrote, “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement.”
Chemicals in a Martian meteorite that were once held up as possible evidence of life on ancient Mars were more likely the product of heat, water and chemistry, according to a new study. Researchers from the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of Oslo in Norway reached that conclusion after comparing the four-pound (two-kilogram) extraterrestrial rock, ALH84001, with samples of earthly volcanic material—and discovering a matching pattern of minerals consistent with a chemical process that yields carbon compounds after rapid heating and cooling.
Although the study does not support the existence of life on Mars, researchers say it shows that some of the chemical precursors of life—at least as we know it—were kicking around on the Red Planet some 4.5 billion years ago.
Tom Hanks plays “Good Time” Charlie Wilson, a go-along-to-get-along Democratic congressman from a rural district in Texas. A hard-drinking womanizer with a sharp eye for foreign affairs, Charlie sits on the congressional committee responsible for funding covert military actions abroad. One debauched evening in 1980, soaking in a Vegas hot tub with a gaggle of coke-snorting strippers, he watches Dan Rather on TV covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Soon after, a fervently anti-Communist Houston socialite, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), invites Charlie to a fund-raiser for the cause of the mujahideen. The two skip out of the party for some (off-screen) Texas lovin’, and by way of pillow talk, Joanne convinces Charlie to take a meeting she’s arranged with the president of Pakistan, Zia ul-Haq (Om Puri).
