Without Warning
David Brooks

My father spent most of his adult life
working for the Commonwealth Public Service, shunting files
from one end of his long desk to the other.
When he died he left half-written
a History of Australian Immigration,
only half-joking when he willed that I should finish it.
Why didn’t he tell me
how little would ever be completed?
letters left unanswered, accounts not settled, promises
never fulfilled, the parts of that motorcycle
unreassembled, lying ten years
on a concrete floor in Westgarth St, people
dying without warning, mid sentence,
taking the next words with them.

From: Walking to Point Clear: Poems 1983-2002
Publisher: Brandl & Schlesinger, Blackheath, 2005

From Science:

In tribal societies, one might expect that the fiercest warriors get the most women and father the most children. But that's not necessarily the case, says a new study of the brutal Waorani tribe of Ecuador. The most aggressive Wao warriors have about the same number of wives and children as milder-mannered men have, and their children are less likely to survive beyond the age of 15, largely due to an endless cycle of revenge killings. The Waorani are one of the most homicidal tribes ever studied. Located in a region just south of the Napo River, the place where the Andes Mountains meet the Amazon Basin, the tribe is preoccupied with revenge. Young Wao men are encouraged to develop a ferocious reputation early on, and before long they start raiding. The tribespeople constantly recount stories of these raids in gruesome detail, noting who was responsible and who needed to be avenged. Half of all Waos die violently.

Studies of a similarly murderous tribe, the Yanomamö of nearby Venezuela, suggested that such homicidal behavior conveyed an evolutionary advantage. In a 1988 paper in Science, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, now a professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that the most aggressive Yanomamö men had higher prestige within the tribe, which led to them having more wives and children, than less-aggressive men. The new study argues that the picture is not so clear-cut. Lead author Stephen Beckerman of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, and colleagues interviewed 121 Waorani elders to compile histories of 95 of the tribe's warriors. (The Waorani are much more peaceful today than they were in the past, possibly due to Christian missionaries, who first made contact in 1958.) The team defined highly aggressive men as those who took part in more than four raids over their lifetimes; some of the most violent warriors fought in as many as 16 raids.

Beckerman's group found no significant difference in the number of wives or children between highly aggressive Wao males and less aggressive males. What's more, the most aggressive warriors had fewer children survive past their reproductive age–about 15 years old–than the more peaceable Wao men had, the researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings show that, at least for the Waorani, it's actually less advantageous to be murderous, because so many of a warrior's children wind up dead before they can reproduce.

More here.

From The New York Times:

It was time, the panel of experts said, to put more science in forensic science. A report in February by a committee of the National Academy of Sciences found “serious problems” with much of the work performed by crime laboratories in the United States. Recent incidents of faulty evidence analysis — including the case of an Oregon lawyer who was arrested by the F.B.I. after the 2004 Madrid terrorist bombings based on fingerprint identification that turned out to be wrong — were just high-profile examples of wider deficiencies, the committee said. Crime labs were overworked, there were few certification programs for investigators and technicians, and the entire field suffered from a lack of oversight.

But perhaps the most damning conclusion was that many forensic disciplines — including analysis of fingerprints, bite marks and the striations and indentations left by a pry bar or a gun’s firing mechanism — were not grounded in the kind of rigorous, peer-reviewed research that is the hallmark of classic science. DNA analysis was an exception, the report noted, in that it had been studied extensively. But many other investigative tests, the report said, “have never been exposed to stringent scientific scrutiny.”

More here.

Pamela Constable in the Washington Post:

When black-turbaned Taliban fighters demanded in January that Islamic sharia law be imposed in Pakistan's Swat Valley, few alarm bells went off in this Muslim nation of about 170 million.

Sharia, after all, is the legal framework that guides the lives of all Muslims.

Officials said people in Swat were fed up with the slow and corrupt state courts, scholars said the sharia system would bring swift justice, and commentators said critics in the West had no right to interfere.

Today, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Swat and Pakistani troops launching an offensive to drive out the Taliban forces, the pendulum of public opinion has swung dramatically. The threat of “Talibanization” is being denounced in Parliament and on opinion pages, and the original defenders of an agreement that authorized sharia in Swat are in sheepish retreat.

More here.

The Seventh HARVEY DAVID PREISLER Memorial Symposium

Saturday, May 16, 2009

9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

The New York Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
250 Greenwich Street, 40^th Floor
New York, NY: 10007

RSVP: In the comments to this post. Seating is limited to the first 100 people who respond.

This invitation to 3 Quarks Daily readers is presented, as always, through the courtesy of my sister Azra in memory of her late husband Harvey David Preisler. As some of you know, the first six speakers at this symposium have all been eminent scientists, including Robert Gallo, Steven Wolfram, medicine Nobel laureate Craig Mello, and last year, Richard Dawkins. This year, we are privileged to have as a speaker Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel, whose work on retrodifferentiation of cells into pluripotent stem cells may well revolutionize medicine as we know it. I suspect that you will be hearing much more about her in the mainstream press very soon. If you are (or can be) in New York City at the time, I urge you not to miss this event!

9:00 a.m: Reception

9:30 a.m: Welcome of guests and tribute to Harvey Preisler by Sheherzad Raza Preisler

9:45 a.m: Introduction of Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel by Azra Raza

10:00 a.m: Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel

Title of Lecture: Human pluripotential stem cells via retrodifferentiation

11:00 a.m: Questions and Discussion

Dr. Harvey David Preisler: Director of Rush Cancer Institute and the Samuel G. Taylor III Professor of Medicine at Rush University, Chicago, died on May 19^th 2002. The cause of death was lymphoma. Dr. Preisler grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and obtained his medical degree from the University of Rochester, NY in 1965. He trained in Medicine at New York Hospitals, Cornell Medical Center, and in Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Institute and Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in NYC. He then joined Mount Sinai hospital in NY, and subsequently moved to Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY to direct the Leukemia Service there for the next 14 years. Dr. Preisler was recruited to Rush University as Director of the Cancer Institute in 1992. At the time of his death, he was the Principal Investigator of a ten million dollar grant from the National Cancer Institute in addition to several other large grants which funded his independent research laboratory with approximately 25 scientists. He published extensively including more than 350 full-length papers in peer reviewed journals, 50 books and/or book chapters and approximately 400 abstracts. He was married to Azra Raza, M.D.

Tribute to Harvey by Azra: http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/05/rx_harvey_david.html

Dr. Ilham Saleh Abuljadayel: was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and obtained her doctorate and post doctoral fellowship in Immunology at Kings College, London University (1986-1990). She discovered the process of retrodifferentiation in the early nineties. This direct reprogramming of differentiated somatic cells is achieved through cell surface receptor contact of more mature adult human cells such as leucocytes. She was awarded worldwide patents on the methodology and device, enabling the production of unprecedented levels of pluripotent stem cells from differentiated cells. Based on her research, Dr. Abuljadayel co-founded the TriStem Group. During the period 1990 to 1995, Dr Abuljadayel worked as a consultant immunologist at the King Fahd Armed Forces Hospital in Jeddah, and from 1996-2000 headed the TriStem Research on retrodifferentiation at the London Hospital, Kings College, Downing College University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke Hospital. In 2000 Dr Abuljadayel performed the first preclinical study on the functional utility of the autologous retrodifferentiated stem cells in collaboration with the George Washington Medical centre, USA, in two animal models of human diseases. From 2003 to 2005 Dr Abuljadayel in a clinical human trial, applied the autologous retrodifferentiated stem cell therapy in aplastic anemia and beta thalassemia-major in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research and the Pakistan Medical Research Council, respectively. She currently resides in the UK and remains the head of research for clinical application of the autologous retrodifferentiated stem cell therapy in hematological and degenerative diseases including rejuvenation.

Judith Larsen. Attractor. 2007

Iris print on somerset paper.

More on this Boston artist here and here.

Special Boy With Freakishly Large Brain Wins Spelling Bee

Making lists of the world’s most impressive monuments is an irrational and ultimately pointless enterprise: Who has seen all the wonders of the world? And what would the criteria be? Yet scribblers have been at it since the second century B.C., when a Greek poet named Antipater of Sidon came up with his canonical seven, now all gone or reduced to rubble except the pyramids of Giza. If Antipater had lived a millennium later, he would surely have put Borobudur, the astonishing stone mountain of exquisitely wrought sculpture in Central Java, on his list. No construction of the preindustrial era makes a more wondrous impression. Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the most well-traveled men of his day, wrote of Borobudur in 1869, in “The Malay Archipelago” (a book usually cited minus its melodious subtitle, “The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise”): “The amount of human labor and skill expended on the Great Pyramids of Egypt sinks into insignificance compared with that required to complete this sculptured hill-temple in the interior of Java.”

more from the WSJ here.

Round the back of Waterloo station in London is a graffitied and bolted blue wooden door you wouldn’t look twice at, behind which are derelict railway tunnels and rooms most recently used as storage space. But visitors entering the door this week will discover an other-wordly art and performance space that is part disconcerting, part frightening and part thrilling. The art project, opening today, is ­entitled Tunnel 228 and is a collaboration between the Old Vic and one of the UK’s most innovative performance companies, Punchdrunk. About 20 artists have work displayed, and it is essentially a Metropolis-inspired weird dream with a mixture of art and live performance by actors. One of the most astonishing things about it is how those involved have ­managed to keep it secret with word of mouth only getting going in the last few days. It is free to get in but only via the website, and organisers fear it will be fully booked up by the end of today.

more from The Guardian here.

From The Boston Globe:

In recent years, cognitive scientists have turned in increasing numbers to the study of human happiness, and one of their central findings is that we are not very good at predicting how happy or unhappy something will make us. Given time, survivors of tragedies and traumas report themselves nearly as happy as they were before, and people who win the lottery or achieve lifelong dreams don't see any long-term increase in happiness. By contrast, annoyances like noise or chronic pain bring down our happiness more than you'd think, and having friends or an extra hour of sleep every night can raise it dramatically.

These findings have fed the growth of a burgeoning “positive psychology” movement focused on helping people enrich their own lives. But now some scholars are starting to ask a bigger question: shouldn't this new understanding affect policy, too? A huge range of social systems, from tort law to urban planning to medical care, are built on assumptions about what makes people happy. Now, for the first time, researchers are claiming to be actually measuring happiness, to actually know what causes it. In a society whose founding document asserts a basic right to the pursuit of happiness, that new knowledge could have far-reaching implications.

More here.

From Salon:

Funny things happen when moms meet Gmail, not just because they get tripped up by technology (plenty do not) but because moms — in their earnestness, their frankness, their goofiness — are simply funny. Anyone looking for further evidence need only flip through “Love, Mom,” a collection of maternal missives to adult children that are as endearing and cringe-inducing and skewed as mothers themselves. Like this little gem: “My computer has software transmitted diseases (STDs) from all the software I had to download for a class… I hate computer STDs. ☹ “

Or this terse slapdown: “Michael, I think you do too many drugs and say too many disparaging things about women on your blog. Love, Mom. “

The book “Love, Mom” originated in a charming website called PostcardsFromYoMomma, started by Doree Shafrir and Jessica Grose after joking about their own maternal correspondence. What began as an experiment — asking friends to send in their own forehead-slapping letters from home — quickly ballooned. “There was no way we could've anticipated the absolute deluge of emails we started to get as soon as the site went up,” Shafrir and Grose write in the introduction to “Love, Mom.” Go figure: When it comes to mothers, people like to vent. But more than mere mockery, the letters are a tribute to the adorable and exasperating quirkiness that make moms, well, moms. As one classic exchange on the Postcards website puts it, “You were welcome to stay in my uterus for nine months, and then my house for 17 years. But I understand, a week at your apartment might be a bit … much.”

More here.

John Gross in the Wall Street Journal:

In the annals of British literature and the British theater, the 1950s have gone down as the era of the Angry Young Men — of a change in the cultural climate signaled above all by Kingsley Amis's novel “Lucky Jim” (1954) and John Osborne's play “Look Back in Anger” (1956). The phrase “Angry Young Men” itself was devised by a theater publicist at the time, and in a rough fashion it indicates what the fuss was about: a scornful rejection of Establishment values, a truculent individualism. But it was never more than a loose journalistic label, and over the years it has lost most of such resonance as it once had.

David Castronovo, who teaches at Pace University in New York, has set out to find a more satisfactory collective term for the writers of the Amis/Osborne generation and their successors. He has come up, as his title proclaims, with “blokes.” In a long introductory chapter he explains that a bloke is “a male who believes in his own spirit and is willing to do almost anything to see that it doesn't die.” Unlike a gentleman, who lives by rituals and codes, a bloke has no time for traditional social disciplines. The qualities that distinguish him include self-assertion, the pursuit of pleasure and “transgressive humor.”

More here.

There are a lot of shocking things about Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, a novel about the destruction of the European Jews that is narrated by a matricidal SS officer named Max Aue, whose greatest joy is having anal sex with his twin sister; but the one that shocks deepest, and longest, is how easily the novel draws you in. I read the book in French (Littell was born in America in 1967, but grew up in France; he wrote The Kindly Ones in French) a couple of years ago and again this winter in Charlotte Mandell’s adroit English translation. Both times, I found myself looking forward to the moment when I was done with other business and could get back to reading about Max Aue and his grisly travels. I am not the only one: the book has sold well over a million copies in Europe, and won the Prix Goncourt, France’s biggest literary prize. As I write this essay, it’s too soon to say if The Kindly Ones will be a big seller in the United States, but some omens are good. When the English translation was published in March of this year, Michael Korda wrote in the Daily Beast, “I guarantee you, if you read this book to the end, and if you have any kind of taste at all, you won’t be able to put it down for a moment—lay in snacks and drinks!” Yes, by all means, if you can keep them down. Reading The Kindly Ones isn’t a comfortable experience, or an ennobling one, but it’s certainly compelling, at least for some readers. The question I want to ask is, why?

more from The Believer here.

Forest Park is one of the largest patches of urban wilderness in the United States, and the Victorian homes and gardens nearby create an air of Tolkienesque enchantment. Right around here in fact, one of Tolkien’s heirs labors in a century-old house. “I agree with Tolstoy that the best way to tell a story is invisibly,” Ursula K. Le Guin says. “But I also hear what I write, and I think if you can’t read it out loud, there’s something wrong with it.” It’s hard to find a literary career as varied as Le Guin’s. At 79, she’s worked for half a century on the ever-shifting frontier between literary and genre writing, a line she has helped redraw with her elegant prose.

more from the LA Times here.

Sixty years ago, at another fraught historical moment, the world and all its troubles seemed to be bound up in the relationship of two men. Between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers was a story so deep in political significance that it has remained a historical touchstone ever since; so personal in its mundane details — did Mrs. Hiss give Mrs. Chambers a lovely old linen towel to use as a diaper? — that thousands have labored to find the answer, as if the truth about the towel held the secret of the world. But I wax lyrical. Susan Jacoby, in her vigorously argumentative new book about the Hiss-­Chambers case, is interested in the towels and the men only as they are reflected in the partisan passions with which the story has been told. For her own part, Jacoby, the author of “The Age of American ­Unreason” and other books, believes ­Alger Hiss was guilty of the perjury for which he was convicted; she is almost, but not entirely, persuaded that Hiss was also a Soviet spy. This strikes me as an odd quibble, but I see that it positions her outside the two camps of scholars who, she says, have used and often misused the tale to further a political agenda. “Indeed,” Jacoby writes, “the conspicuous trait uniting Hiss’s dogged ex post facto bloodhounds with his die-hard defenders is the need to be 100 percent right in order to vindicate not only their verdict on American history but the governmental policies they espouse today.”

more from the NY Times here.

Making Lists
Imtiaz Dharker

The best way to put
things in order is
to make a list.
The result of this
efficiency is that everything
is named, and given
an allotted place.

But I find, when I begin,
there are too many things,
starting from black holes
all the way to safety pins.

And of course the whole
of history is still there.
Just the fact that it has
already happened doesn’t mean
it has gone elsewhere.
It is sitting hunched
on people’s backs,
wedged in corners
and in cracks,
and has to be accounted for.
The future too.

But I must admit
the bigger issues interest
me less and less.

My list, as I move down in,
becomes domestic,
a litany of laundry
and of groceries.
These are the things
that preoccupy me.

The woman’s blouse is torn.
It is held together
with a safety pin.

from: Postcards from God;
Viking Penguin, New Delhi, 1994

Forty years ago, I was enraptured by Israel's courageous sense of mission. For me today, as for many, that idealism has palled.

Max Hastings in The Guardian:

I first visited Israel in 1969. It was a time when much of the western world was still passionately enthused about the country's triumph in the 1967 six-day war. President Nasser had for years promised to sweep the Israelis into the sea. Instead, the tiny Jewish state, less than 20 years old, had engaged the armies of three Arab nations, and crushingly defeated them all. The Israelis successively smashed through Nasser's divisions on the western front, scaled and seized the Golan Heights, and snatched east Jerusalem and the West Bank in the face of Hussein's highly capable Jordanian army. Sinai was left strewn with the boots of fleeing Egyptians. The Israeli victory was an awesome display of command boldness, operational competence and human endeavour.

There was a euphoria in Israel in those days, which many visitors shared. We watched Jews from all over the world gathering to pray at the Wailing Wall for the first time in almost 2,000 years; Israelis of all ages revelling in the sensation of being able to work the kibbutzim of the north free from Syrian shells. From inhabiting one of the most claustrophobic places in the world, suddenly they found themselves free to roam miles across Sinai on a weekend. The soldiers of the Israeli army, careerists, conscripts and reservists alike, walked 10ft tall – the image of an exulting soldier made it on to the cover of Life magazine. They had shown themselves one of the greatest fighting forces of history, expunging almost at a stroke the memory of Jewish impotence in the face of centuries of persecution, of six million being herded helpless into cattle trucks for the death camps.

More here.