You are more bacteria than you are you, according to the latest body census.

Melinda Wenner in Scientific American:

We compulsively wash our hands, spray our countertops and grimace when someone sneezes near us—in fact, we do everything we can to avoid unnecessary encounters with the germ world. But the truth is we are practically walking petri dishes, rife with bacterial colonies from our skin to the deepest recesses of our guts.

All the bacteria living inside you would fill a half-gallon jug; there are 10 times more bacterial cells in your body than human cells, according to Carolyn Bohach, a microbiologist at the University of Idaho (U.I.), along with other estimates from scientific studies. (Despite their vast numbers, bacteria don’t take up that much space because bacteria are far smaller than human cells.) Although that sounds pretty gross, it’s actually a very good thing.

The infestation begins at birth: Babies ingest mouthfuls of bacteria during birthing and pick up plenty more from their mother’s skin and milk—during breast-feeding, the mammary glands become colonized with bacteria.

More here.

Think today’s movies suck? Imagine the ones that never get made. Read some of Hollywood’s all-time worst pitches, then submit your own to guest judge Harvey Weinstein.

Neel Shah in Radar:

Given the fare that makes it into theaters these days, it’s hard to imagine any film or TV idea too dumb to see the light of day. Turns out, you just weren’t trying hard enough. Radar asked a number of leading producers, agents, and writers to share the worst pitches they’ve ever had to endure.

Wheels
The Pitch: Jerry Maguire in a wheelchair.
The Premise: “A hotshot sports agent parks in a handicapped spot and gets sentenced by a judge to spend a month in a wheelchair,” recalls a creative exec at a major production house. “Which is fine, until he falls for a woman with a real disability, but doesn’t explain that he isn’t actually handicapped. How’s that for a third-act complication, motherfucker?!”
Suggested Tagline: You had me at paraplegic.

Homeless Friends
The Pitch: Like Friends, except everyone’s homeless.
The Premise: “The cast was supposed to be young and good-looking; they just happened to live on the streets,” recalls a prominent TV agent. “The conceit was that everyone would hang out in Central Park instead of Central Perk. The guy really thought we could sell it to NBC.”
Suggested Cast: Michael Pitt (Chandler), Courtney Love (Rachel), Gary Busey (Joey), Pete Doherty (Ross), Natasha Lyonne (Phoebe), Mary-Kate Olsen (Monica).

More here and contest details here.

For Asad Raza, via Mtanga:

From Discover:

They say aging is one of the only certain things in life. But it turns out they were wrong. In recent years, gerontologists have overturned much of the conventional wisdom about getting old. Aging is not the simple result of the passage of time. According to a provocative new view, it is actually something our own bodies create, a side effect of the essential inflammatory system that protects us against infectious disease. As we fight off invaders, we inflict massive collateral damage on ourselves, poisoning our own organs and breaking down our own tissues. We are our own worst enemy. This paradox is transforming the way we understand aging. It is also changing our understanding of what diseases are and where they come from. Inflammation seems to underlie not just senescence but all the chronic illnesses that often come along with it: diabetes, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s, heart attack. The idea that chronic diseases might be caused by persistent inflammation has been kicking around since the 19th century. Only in the past few years, though, have modern biochemistry and the emerging field of systems biology made it possible to grasp the convoluted chemical interactions involved in bodywide responses like inflammation.

When you start to think about aging as a consequence of inflammation, you start to see old age in a different, much more hopeful light. If decrepitude is driven by an overactive immune system, then it is treatable. And if many chronic diseases share this underlying cause, they might all be remedied in a similar way. The right anti-inflammatory drug could be a panacea, treating diabetes, dementia, heart disease, and even cancer. Such a wonder drug might allow us to live longer, but more to the point, it would almost surely allow us to live better, increasing the odds that we could all spend our old age feeling like Jim Hammond: healthy, vibrant, and vital. And unlike science fiction visions of an immortality pill, a successful anti-inflammatory treatment could actually happen within our lifetime.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

Among white Americans, the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans, it was 106. Among Jewish Americans, it was 113. Among Latino Americans, it was 89. Among African-Americans, it was 85. Around the world, studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Sarahan Africans 70. One IQ table shows 113 in Hong Kong, 110 in Japan, and 100 in Britain. White populations in Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States score closer to one another than to the worldwide black average. It’s been that way for at least a century.

Remember, these are averages, and all groups overlap. You can’t deduce an individual’s intelligence from her ethnicity. The only thing you can reasonably infer is that anyone who presumes to rate your IQ based on the color of your skin is probably dumber than you are.

So, what should we make of the difference in averages?

More here.

Also Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14 and Part 15 as well.

Over at the NYPL, Benjamin Kunkel, Meghan Falvey, Alex Gourevitch, Mark Greif and Chad Harbach of n+1 discuss the politics of fear.

Fear of terrorism was the chief political asset of the Bush administration during its heyday. Now that the Democratic party and environmentalism are in the ascendant, is a right wing politics of fear being succeeded by a left-liberal politics of fear? Can progressive politics appeal to our hopes and desires rather than our nightmares? Or are the threats we face—including global warming and energy scarcity—so ominous that a politics of fear is the only credible kind left?

Click on the video link on the right column.

In the NYT:

Elizabeth Hardwick, the critic, essayist, fiction writer and co-founder of The New York Review of Books, who went from being a studious Southern Belle to a glittering member of the New York City intellectual elite, died Sunday night in Manhattan. She was 91.

Her death, at a Manhattan hospital, was confirmed today by her daughter, Harriet Lowell.

Known mainly as a critic, and credited for expanding the possibilities of the literary essay through her intimate tone and her dramatic deployment of forceful logic, Ms. Hardwick nevertheless resisted easy classification. Although born into a large Protestant family in Lexington, Ky., she had her eye on New York City and its culture from an early age.

“Even when I was in college, ‘down home,’ I’m afraid my aim was — if it doesn’t sound too ridiculous — my aim was to be a New York Jewish intellectual,” she told an interviewer in 1979. “I say ‘Jewish’ because of their tradition of rational skepticism; and also a certain deracination appeals to me — and their openness to European culture.”

Aoife Kavanagh in Le Monde Diplomatique:

When President Robert Mugabe came to power in 1980 the country was thriving. Its health and education services were the envy of the region and, thanks to a first-class infrastructure and a healthy economy, the future looked bright. It doesn’t look like that now.

Last Friday the ritual queuing began at first light in the centre of the capital, Harare. As dawn broke, two separate lines intertwined on the corner of Lake Takawira Street. The longest was motivated by a rumour that circulated around the city overnight that there was bread in town. Up and down the line people were on mobile phones, texting and calling friends to give them the latest information. Yet many people walked away empty-handed. When bread and flour do come on the market, they are often bought up in bulk and sold on at inflated prices on the black market, which is the real market.

It’s not just bread. Those who have the purchasing power buy what they can maize, cooking oil or beans often at government-subsidised prices. Instead of supplying the domestic market, they export the goods to neighbouring Mozambique or Botswana to earn precious foreign currency, although the poorest in Zimbabwe can barely afford one meal a day.

“If I don’t get the bread today, who knows, maybe I won’t be able to afford it tomorrow,” a woman in the bread queue told me. She was probably right. Within a month inflation, which already stood at 7,900%, the highest in the world, was widely reported to have jumped to 14,000%.

John Allen Paulos over at abc.com.

Why then are candidates for the presidency never presented with a few simple puzzles to help the electorate gauge their cognitive agility? The same goes for interviewers who ask the same dreary, insipid questions time after time and accept the same dreary, insipid non-answers time after time.

These puzzles shouldn’t be difficult since, after all, the primary job of the president is to enforce the Constitution, ensure an honest and open administration, and, in some generalized sense, make things better. For this task, judgment and wisdom are more essential than the ability to solve puzzles. Nevertheless, I think some non-standard questions like the following would help winnow, or at least chasten, some of the candidates…

1. Scaling. Imagine a small state or city with, let’s say, a million people and an imaginative and efficient health care program. The program is not necessarily going to work in a vast country with a population that is 300 times as large. Similarly a flourishing small company that expands rapidly often becomes an unwieldy large one. Problems and surprises arise as we move from the small to the large since social phenomena generally do not scale upward in a regular or proportional manner.

A simple, yet abstract problem of this type? How about the following (answers on page 4): A model car, an exact replica of a real one in scale, weight, material, et cetera, is 6 inches (1/2 foot) long, and the real car is 15 feet long, 30 times as long. If the the circumference of a wheel on the model is 3 inches, what is the circumference of a wheel on the real car? If the hood of the model car has an area of 4 square inches, what is the area of the real car’s hood? If the model car weighs 4 pounds, what does the real car weigh?

Volume three of John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso has now appeared and, like the first two installments of the biography,[*] it is a work so rich with information and insight that it will forever change our understanding of the artist. The book opens in 1917 when Picasso was thirty-five and closes in 1932 when he was fifty-one; it was during this span that he became the richest and most famous painter on earth. Yet the volume’s subtitle, “The Triumphant Years,” refers more to his sustained artistic success than to his worldly prosperity.

Throughout this period, in a rush of ceaseless creativity, Picasso devised and explored one new experiment in style after another, shifting back and forth between many different modes of representation at a rate of speed and with a measure of confidence unmatched in the history of art. It was for Picasso a time of innovation nearly as bold and original as that of the first Cubist period that began with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, but the very diversity of his experiments has made them difficult for historians to grasp or explain. Revealing himself to be a master of criticism as well as of biography, Richardson not only casts new light on each of the innovations Picasso discovered, he also shows, better than anyone has before, how the various experiments were interrelated.

more from the NYRB here.

Tolstoy is the great novelist of physical involuntariness. The body helplessly confesses itself, and the novelist seems merely to run and catch its spilled emotion. A friend of the novelist’s, the critic Aleksandr Druzhinin, ribbed him about it in a letter: “You are sometimes on the point of saying that so-and-so’s thighs showed that he wanted to travel in India!” The old patriarch Prince Bolkonsky, for instance, loves his son, Andrei, and his daughter, Marya, so fiercely that he cannot express that love in any form except spiteful bullying, yelling in the presence of his spinsterish daughter, “If only some fool would marry her!” His hands register “the still persistent and much-enduring strength of fresh old age,” but his face occasionally betrays suppressed tenderness. As he says farewell to his son, who is going to war, he is his usual self, gruffly shouting “Off with you!” Yet “something twitched in the lower part of the old prince’s face.”

Tolstoy can seem almost childlike in his simplicity, because he is not embarrassed to do the kind of thing beloved of children’s and fairy-tale writers when they read the emotions on the face of a cat or a donkey. When Prince Andrei’s wife dies in childbirth, her dead face appears to say to the living, “Ah, what have you done to me?”

more from The New Yorker here.

A heavy morning mist lifts to reveal sweeping meadows above the riverside town of Foca in Eastern Bosnia: receding mountain ridges and nestled hamlets surrounded by haystacks. But what the emergent sun does not illuminate is the whereabouts of the man believed hidden in this vast landscape, with its closed doors and its impervious inhabitants: Radovan Karadzic, former leader of the Bosnian Serbs.

Karadzic – for 12 years fugitive from a supposedly rigorous search effort by the intelligence services and soldiers of the West. Karadzic – with his military counterpart, General Ratko Mladic – indicted and wanted for genocide and a bloody litany of war crimes against innocent civilians during the tempest of mass murder, massacre, mass rape, concentration camps and ‘ethnic cleansing’ (a term Karadzic himself devised) they unleashed against the Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992. A tempest that continued for three years until the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 men and boys over five days in 1995.

more from The Observer Review here.

From Nature:

A particularly cunning seven-year-old chimp named Ayumu has bested university students at a game of memory. He and two other young chimps recalled the placement of numbers flashed onto a computer screen faster and more accurately than humans. “It’s a very simple fact: chimpanzees are better than us — at this task,” says Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at Kyoto University in Japan who led the study.

The work doesn’t mean that chimps are ‘smarter’ than humans, but rather they seem to be better at memorizing a snapshot view of their surroundings — whether that be numbers on a screen or ripe figs dangling from a tree. Humans may have lost this capacity in exchange for gaining the brainpower to understand language and complex symbols, says Matsuzawa.

More here.

From The New York Times:

For Claude Monet, 1912-22 was a watershed decade. He was perhaps the most successful artist of his time, and his genius had already assured him a place in history. But as he aged, his painting noticeably lost subtlety. Brush strokes became bolder, and colors strikingly blue, orange or brown. His images lost detail and flowed into one another. His days as an avant-garde rebel had long passed, but some critics would later wonder whether the Impressionist was suddenly trying to become an abstract expressionist.

What has long been known about Monet’s later years is that he suffered from cataracts and that his eyesight worsened so much that he painted from memory. He acknowledged to an interviewer that he was “trusting solely to the labels on the tubes of paint and to the force of habit.”

More here.

Anthony McCall. You and I Horizontal (I). 2005.

Video film.

More on this fabulous light artist here, here and here.

Currently at the Serpentine Gallery, London (pictures just don’t capture the true magic of his work!)

Thanks to Jaffer Kolb.

From Arts & Opinion:

GABRIEL MATTHEW SCHIVONE: What makes students a natural audience to speak to? And do you think it’s worth ‘speaking truth’ to the professional scholarship as well or differently? Are there any short- or long-term possibilities here?

CHOMSKY: I’m always uneasy about the concept of “speaking truth,” as if we somehow know the truth and only have to enlighten others who have not risen to our elevated level. The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavour. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.

As for possibilities, they are limited only by will and choice.

Students are at a stage of their lives where these choices are most urgent and compelling, and when they also enjoy unusual, if not unique, freedom and opportunity to explore the choices available, to evaluate them, and to pursue them.

More here.

Sara Dickerman in Slate:

It gets ever harder to be a snob these days. Take food: It used to be a simple familiarity with Valrhona chocolate or a decent recipe for pad Thai could convince companions that you were an alpha in the food realm. Now, however, what was once esoteric food knowledge has trickled out of the subcultural creeks and into general culture. So, to help you take your food knowledge to the next level, David Kamp, who wrote last year’s savvy history of the American “food revolution,” The United States of Arugula, and who’s also sought to define the film- and rock-snob subcultures, has partnered with Marion Rosenfeld to put together a little book called The Food Snob’s Dictionary.

Part Preppy Handbook, part Dictionary of Received Ideas, and quite funny throughout, the Food Snob’s handbook doesn’t so much seek to define individual terms, like poulet de Bresse (the esteemed French chicken) or induction cookers (the electromagnetic cooktop), as define how such terms can be used to score points against other snobs or food-loving novices. Take a line from the FSD‘s definition of “nouvelle cuisine,” the French food movement of the 1960s and ’70s: “Snobs love to clear up the misperceptions that nouvelle chefs favored tiny portions and rejected cream-based sauces, noting that it was flour-based sauces that nouvelle-ers shunned.”

More here.

Richard Conniff in Smithsonian Magazine:

In our hearts, we like to think that all the great ideas and inventions have come from salt-of-the-earth, self-made men and women. But students of “affluenza,” the social condition of being rich and wanting to be richer, have lately come to credit rich people as the driving force behind almost every great advance in civilization, from the agricultural revolution to the indoor toilet.

This is of course a disconcerting idea, even for the researchers who have proposed it. And plenty of other researchers say they are wrong. But before we crank up our moral dudgeon, we should know that the rich in question are almost certainly family. Like it or not, we are probably descended from them, according to Michigan anthropologist Laura Betzig.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

From The Boston Globe:

ONE MORNING A year ago, author Will Self sucked the life out of a cigarette and – careful not to wake the children – crept down the stairs in his house. Then he plunged out into the gloaming to begin his long walk from London to Manhattan. Officially, of course, such a feat is impossible, given the ocean that separates them. But Self had discovered the secret of concatenating one city onto another, at least in his own mind. He would hike for hours through the exurbs of London until he reached Heathrow; next he would scramble up an oily embankment and scoot around a chain-link fence to dash straight into the airport terminal; then he would sleep on the plane, for all purposes erasing the flight from memory; then, once he reached JFK Airport, he would sneak along a service road, hoping not to be apprehended as a terrorist, and begin the long trek to the Lower East Side. Will Self, the son of a Yank and a Brit, was about to sew two cities into one imaginary metropolis.

The author has become one of the leading – and one of the few – practitioners of a science called psychogeography. In the 1960s, the French Situationists coined the term to describe a radical method of mapping cities. Through aimless walks, they would recover what was unnoticed in the urban landscape, performing a phrenology of all its bumps and dollops. Self has revived the science and put his own stamp on it. He espouses walks from Point A to a ridiculously distant Point B as a method of reclaiming the in-between landscapes, and of hurtling himself into a pre-industrial sense of time.

More here.